Always In Your Shadow
by Arinus
Summary: Severus Snape has a brief affair with Bellatrix, and then finds himself caught in a struggle to save the resulting daughter from the depths of madness her mother seems so intent to pull the child into, even from her cell at Azkaban. AU, In-character.
1. PROLOGUE

**UPDATED: 9/30/2009: Fixed formatting, language inconsistencies (American/UK English used in dialogue), removed unnecessary author notes. This story ends with Chapter Seventeen (Ch #19 according to ff.n) and will be continued in a sequel coming soon. Constructive criticism, as well as reader feedback, is always welcome. Thanks to those who made formatting/language authenticity suggestions, and who caught my minor typographical errors!**

* * *

SETTING: In the years following the graduation from Hogwarts of the Marauders.

ALTERATIONS: History has been stretched and squeezed a bit for timing, but events remain similar in respect to Voldemort's actions and eventual downfall through Harry Potter. For this story, Mr. LeStrange has already been killed, while Bellatrix remains at large.

**WARNING: This story contains flashbacks of violence to/in front of a young child. It is no more graphic than it needs to be, and is necessary to the storyline, but some people may be disturbed by it.  
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Prologue: Bellatrix's Belly

When Bellatrix LeStrange learned she was with child, she knew her late husband was not the father. In fact, she knew exactly whose child it would be, and whose image it would be raised in.

"You are the child of the Dark Lord," she would croon to her slowly rounding belly, her expression manic. "You will be raised to love him as I do; you will be a servant of his from the very beginning, and you will be an honour to your mother, to the Dark Lord; to the wizarding race."

Of course, the very idea that Bellatrix had had intercourse with the Dark Lord was absurd, and even Bella did not believe this to be the truth; rather, she did not care to acknowledge who had physically fathered the child, but she knew that she had conceived with the Dark Lord's glory in her mind, and knew that her child was to be born as a lifelong servant to do his bidding; a greater glory she could not imagine.

In the year since her husband had been killed by blood traitors, Bellatrix had carried on brief affairs with several of her fellow Death Eaters, and any of a number of them could have fathered her child, but Bellatrix did not care which one it was, although she eventually had a strong idea who it was when the child grew older. She alone knew what was best for this child, she thought, and so she alone would present the child to the Dark Lord as a humble servant from the day of its birth.

**o-o-o-o-o**

Bellatrix gave birth to a tiny, skinny-limbed girl in the dead of winter. Its skin was pale, its mouth a small, thin-lipped pout. Its eyes were as dark and fathomless as the bottom of a well, and the feathery hair atop its head was jet-black. The name on her birth certificate was Calista Lestrange, but Bella called her simply "Daughter".

Bellatrix thought her child was beautiful; she bore enough of a resemblance to her mother, and in the child's dark, dark eyes Bella imagined she could already see a devotion to the Dark Lord and his deeds.

Although Bellatrix had triumphantly told Lord Voldemort of her child, and of her intended purpose for the child, the Dark Lord had shown only minimal interest. Bellatrix was wounded and insulted when the Dark Lord insisted that a child must be sixteen to be accepted into the circle of Death Eaters.

Although she insisted that the child could be raised in the Dark Lord's image, as no other had been, and would someday prove his most loyal servant, the Dark Lord took no interest in infants.

As the first few years of the child's life passed, Bellatrix ensured that she was raised as a lifelong servant to the Dark Lord must be raised; Bellatrix amused the child with tales of the exploits of the Death Eaters and the glory they would one day bring their kind; as the baby grew into a toddler, Bellatrix occasionally brought her daughter along when she terrorized Muggles and Muggle-borns.

Although Bellatrix would laugh maniacally at her own antics, the child did not seem to laugh or smile at all; instead she watched the world with those dark, unreadable eyes and a solemn expression.

When the girl was three, Bella began taking her along when she went Muggle-hunting. She thought the child should begin learning about the pride she should have in her heritage as young as possible, and thus it was that Bella's daughter, as a toddler, was witness to the torture and murder of dozens of Muggles.

She was four the first time that Bellatrix placed the wand into her hand and encouraged her to try it as well. The girl had not yet shown any real signs of magical ability, but Bellatrix wanted to encourage her, in the hopes that it would help her tap into her magical potential.

When the girl would seem to make no attempt to use the wand, Bellatrix would punish her, by depriving her of dinner, or, more often, by lecturing her about the pride she should be taking in such activities.

Bellatrix was not above using curses such as the Cruciatus Curse and the Imperius Curse on her own daughter, and she grew increasingly frustrated when even under the influence of the Imperius Curse, the child would not be able to use the wand.

Plagued by fears that her own flesh and blood might be a Squib, Bella began pushing the child ever harder, and punishing her more severely and more often when she did not meet her mother's standards.

As a result, the child all but refused to speak, and her eyes would glitter with malice and resentment when they would show any emotion at all. Other times, her dark eyes were blank and bottomless, a result that, in the young face, was perhaps even more frightening than cold anger.

Sometime in the child's fifth year, members of the hateful Order of the Phoenix arrived in the midst of a Muggle hunt, and Bellatrix found herself caught up in a duel with her cousin, Sirius Black. Caught off guard, Bellatrix was disarmed, and her wand landed at the child's feet.

"Give me my wand!" Bellatrix called to her daughter, holding out her hand, the long white fingers pointing to the child. "Give Mama the wand, now!"

The girl looked at her mother, who was crouched on the ground a good eight feet away from her wand, and kicked the wand, sending it rolling away from herself and her mother.

Bellatrix howled with rage and lunged for the wand, and though Sirius attempted to intercept her, she was able to snatch it up. Immediately, she turned her wand on the child, her eyes blazing with anger.

"Idiot girl!" she screeched, "_Crucio!_"

The girl's world turned black and red with indescribable pain, and she fell to the grass, writhing. Bellatrix kept the wand trained on the child, shaking it to punctuate her words now and then.

"You _will_ learn to do as you're told! You will make your Mama proud! You will follow the Dark Lor—," In her rage, Bella had forgotten about Sirius, who tackled her bodily, sending her sprawling and her wand to the ground again.

"Evil bitch," Sirius growled, now pointing his own wand at the nape of her neck as he pinned her to the ground. "It is only for the sake of the child that I don't kill you right now. Evidently she's been exposed to enough trauma just by living with you -- I won't make her witness your death."

Placing a curse on Bella to temporarily rend her immobile, Sirius stood and reached a hand towards the little girl, who was shakily getting up from the ground herself.

"Come here, girl," Sirius said, his wand still pointed at the woman on the ground. "I'll bring you somewhere safer than this. You shouldn't be here."

The child made no move either towards him or away from him, and Sirius briefly found himself wondering if Bellatrix had managed to damage the child's wits, for she only stared blankly.

"Come on," he repeated urgently, the sounds of battle all around them, "This is no place for children."

When the girl still didn't move, he reached forward and grabbed her wrist, pulling her along with him hurriedly.

Later, Sirius sat at a medium-sized round wooden table, the girl next to him. At another place was Remus Lupin, and Lily and James Potter, side by side. The rest of the seats were empty.

The adults were engaged in a soft, urgent conversation, and though many glances were shot at the dark-haired, pale-skinned child, she herself didn't speak at all.

"I couldn't leave her with Bellatrix," Sirius was saying, his tone registering disgust at his cousin's name. "She was _torturing_ her own child. That girl shouldn't even have _been_ there."

James nodded uneasily, and glanced at the child before murmuring to Sirius.

"But we can't keep her here; Bellatrix is going to come looking for her. It's not going to be easy to hide her child from her, she could have tracking spells on her or something. It's far too risky, it could lead Death Eaters straight to us… She shouldn't be here any more than she should've been at that battle scene…"

Sirius ran his hand through his black hair in frustration.

"I know, I know! But what was I supposed to do? She was using unforgivable curses on her own child! And if she's Bellatrix's daughter," he nodded towards the small girl, "Then she's related to me, too. I should take care of her."

Lily watched the conversation, her eyes darting in between each man as he spoke, and reached her hand out to stroke the little girl's hair gently.

"Are you allright?" she asked the child softly, "Are you hungry?"

The little girl didn't answer, though she looked at Lily with dark, unreadable eyes.

Lily, conscious of the baby growing in her own belly, felt her heart break at the sight of those strange, alien eyes. A child should not wear so bleak an expression, and Lily thought she could die before she would let her own child look so miserable.

Disheartened, she looked back at the men, listening to their discussion about the child.

"No offense meant, Sirius," James said hesitantly, "but now that she's here… Well, how do you know she isn't going to report to her mother the things she's seen here? It might make finding us a lot easier."

Sirius rolled his eyes.

"Come on, she's only a child. And I don't think Mum is her favorite person just now…"

He glanced at the child for confirmation, but she stared blankly at the table as though she had not even heard him speak.

"Something's wrong with her," Lily said softly, reaching her hand out to touch the girl's forehead gently. "I think she might be ill, or something. Children aren't this quiet."

Remus furrowed his brow and nodded a bit, as if he had been thinking the same thing, James looked uncomfortable, and Sirius just shrugged.

"I wouldn't exactly be the life of the party either, after living with Bellatrix."

Despite his words, Lily was still uneasy. Perhaps it was a mother-to-be's intuition, but she just knew that something wasn't right.

In the end, it was decided that the little girl would stay at the Order Headquarters, at least for now. After all, its location was untraceable without being betrayed by the Secret-Keeper, whatever spells Bellatrix may or may not have put on her daughter, and removing the girl from headquarters and possibly allowing her whereabouts to be traced was far more dangerous than simply leaving her where she was. Long-term, it really wasn't the place for a child to grow, but in the meantime, it was decided to be the best option.

Ironically, in time it was Remus Lupin who became the closest thing to the child's guardian, partly because of his lycanthropy, which confined him to headquarters in the days following and preceding his transformations.

Sirius became increasingly wrapped up in the tasks of his position in the Order, and so it was Remus that often sat with the girl and read to her, or simply talked to her.

Lily, too, spent more and more time with the child as her own pregnancy continued and she refrained from the riskier Order business.

Neither of them could coax a word out of the child, and gradually the adults simply accepted that, for reasons unknown to them, she seemed to be mute. Over time, as the child became accustomed to them, she would reply with a slight nod, or the ghost of a smile, but she would not speak a word.

Time passed. Lily gave birth to a beautiful boy, and she and James were blissfully happy bonding with their son, Harry.

With the war between the Order and the Death Eaters nearing its climax, no one had much time for the silent child of Bellatrix LeStrange, but Remus made sure he found the time to read to her, if only for a few minutes, each night.

Although she never spoke, the girl became absorbed in each of the tales he read to her, and some of the bleakness seemed to recede from her features when she was entranced by a story.

Of course, as the whole world knows, when Harry was just over a year old, tragedy struck: Peter Pettigrew betrayed the Potters to Voldemort, and Sirius Black took the fall.

With Voldemort's fall from power, the Order no longer needed to keep a Headquarters, and it was impossible for Remus to take the child with him to his home, given his condition.

In the end, the child was brought to an orphanage that specialized in finding placement for children orphaned by the war. Technically, its purpose was to serve the families that had been killed by Death Eaters, but Dumbledore and Remus decided that the child was enough of a victim of the war to qualify, and she was placed in the home under a false name.

**o-o-o-o-o**

THREE MONTHS LATER

"The war is over, and I have more than proved my loyalty," Severus Snape said silkily, as he stood across Dumbledore's desk from the wizened old man. "Now I must ask you for some information, information that I was not privy to as a double agent. It has to do with the business of the Order."

"There are some things in which I am completely bound to secrecy, Severus, but I will help you if I can. You have certainly earned that."

Dumbledore flicked his light blue eyes up to the sallow-skinned man, wondering what he wanted to know.

"Two years ago, Bellatrix LeStrange's daughter was kidnapped, supposedly by Sirius Black. I want to know what happened to that girl. Bellatrix enlisted the Dark Lord's assistance to find her, and Death Eaters searched for months before giving up. Bellatrix said the girl was tracked, so I know the only place she could have been held alive was the Order Headquarters. I want to know what happened to her."

"Surely your loyalties to Ms. Lestrange don't stretch so far that you are still enlisted to learn about this girl well after she herself is already in Azkaban?" Dumbledore queried, his voice even and calm.

"I see no need to disclose my personal reasons for wanting this information. Either you will disclose it to me or you won't."

"Of course. Pardon an old man's curiosity—,"

Snape cut him off.

"The only reason you need to know why I'm interested in the information is if you question my motives, which is to question my loyalty. I'm certain that isn't what you're intending," he said testily; Dumbledore noted that the younger man was much more agitated and less composed than usual, and thus forgave his attitude, and smiled blithely.

"Well," Dumbledore said jauntily, "I guess you've made your point. The girl is still alive, and to my knowledge, was never harmed. She is presently at the Francis Orphanage, the one run by St. Mungo's for children displaced by the war, unless she's had the fortune of being adopted since I saw her there three months ago."

The newly-appointed Potions professor (thwarted the first of many times from obtaining the Defence Against the Dark Aets post) nodded curtly and left the office.

The orphanage was better than some, but it was still crowded and full of dismay. No amount of brightly colored toys and cheery staff could replace the families these children had lost, and the overall atmosphere of the place was bleak enough to remind Severus of his own childhood.

He looked around at the children in the common area for one that might be the girl he was looking for, but there wasn't a black-haired child among them; Severus had only seen a brief glimpse of the child, once, but he knew that her hair was as pitch-dark as her mother's.

"Welcome! Welcome to Francis House!" a staff member with an American accent greeted him far too brightly, "I'm Elisa. Do you have an appointment?"

"No," Severus said quietly, glancing at the woman. She was a tall, wiry blond with a lot of freckles and an expansive mass of frizzy curls. "Actually, I'm looking for a specific child that I was told is here. The… child of a… lost friend."

"Visitations are generally done by appointment," Elisa told him, "But I can make an exception. What's the name of the child you're looking for?"

"Chloe Smith," he said, using the false name Dumbledore had told him the child had been left at the orphanage with.

"Oh… You're here to visit Chloe?" the woman seemed strangely caught off-guard, and attempted to cover it with a falsely bright smile. "Uhm… that's great! Right this way, she's probably in her room."

Severus followed the woman out of the common room and down a few narrow hallways. Doors lined both sides of every hall, and led to small, dim rooms that held six bunks each. Finally, at the very rear of the building, the staff person tapped twice on the closed door in front of them, and walked in without waiting for a reply.

The room was empty but for two girls, Severus saw. One was fair-haired and the other had dingy mouse-brown hair, and both were bent over something in the far corner of the room, between a set of bunks and the wall. They giggled, and he thought he heard something distinctively sinister about the laughter.

"Jessica, Allison," the wiry, curly-topped lady said admonishingly, "I hope you're playing nice. Some kids find it hard to adjust to the way of life here at Francis House."

Severus could tell that her words were more for him than the two little girls, who both looked up furtively and stifled further giggles. It was only when the lighter-haired of the two girls stood up, did he notice the fistful of dark hair she held onto, and quickly dropped as she met Elisa's gaze, and he slowly realized that there was another child in the room.

In the corner, where the girls had been hunched over, was a smaller, slighter form whose face was obscured by masses of tangled, lank-looking black hair.

The mousy-haired girl aimed a swift, small kick at the dark-haired girl before the two girls scurried around Elisa and out of the room, both with hands pressed to their mouths to stem a tide of sinister giggles.

Elisa sent a frustrated look after the pair, but entered the room, beckoning Severus to follow.

"Chloe!" she said with false brightness, and Severus could tell that Elisa was not overly fond of the little dark-haired 'Chloe'.

"Someone's here to see you. His name is…" she looked at him expectantly, but Severus ignored the curly-haired woman and instead looked down at the child.

She was small and thin, and her skin was so pale it appeared to have an almost yellowish tint to it. He couldn't see her face, because it was obscured beneath a mass of tangled, greasy hair. Clearly, this girl wasn't the picture of perfect hygiene, and Elisa seemed to notice this as well.

"We only require weekly bathing," she explained in cheery tones, "Other than that, we let the children decide on their own rhythm… it can be difficult getting in to the washroom to gussy up with so many little girls all vying for a space in front of the mirror!".

Her voice was so artificially saccharine that Severus felt slightly ill.

The sound of Elisa's high-pitched voice elicited a different response from the child; she lifted her face, and glared at Elisa with an expression that was nothing short of scathing. Perhaps it was this expression that made the impression of the girl jolt Severus' brain the way it did, or perhaps he had known all along what he would see in the child's face; after all, he had been wondering for six long years something that Bellatrix would refuse to discuss.

Severus had carried on an affair with Bellatrix (for a simple diversion more than anything else, as in truth, he detested the overzealous, half-crazed woman) for months, and it had ended abruptly with the announcement of Bellatrix's pregnancy. Of course, Bellatrix had never been exactly faithful to her husband, and so there were probably several possibilities as to who could have fathered her child.

Now, looking at the girl before him, he knew exactly why Bellatrix had refused to let him or anyone else in the Dark Lord's inner circle set eyes on the child. Anyone would have known, had they looked at her eyes…

The girl's face was thin and angular, her cheekbones jutting outwards in much the same way her mother's did. Her nose was narrow, and a little too long for her face. Her mouth was a thin-lipped scowl, and her hair hung lankly.

She was by no means pretty, but she was striking; it was the eyes. They were so dark that they didn't have a discernible color, and they glittered distantly with malice, while they were mainly hidden by a vast bleakness that made her strange features more of a mask than anything else.

Her eyes, dark and bottomless, and so full of _emptiness_, were a mirror of his own cold, midnight eyes.

Severus only looked at them for a few seconds, before the girl leapt up, the book she had been huddled in the corner with falling to the floor with a loud thud. She glared at Elisa icily, but didn't say anything.

Elisa scowled nearly as nastily at the wretched-looking child before continuing in her treacle-sweet voice.

"Well, I'll just let you two visit. You'll have twenty minutes. If you want longer, I'm afraid you'll need to book an appointm--,"

"The visit won't be necessary after all," Severus said, his words clipped as he looked at the curly-haired woman, whom he decided he didn't care for at all. "I want to adopt this child."

"Oh!" Elisa's expression of surprise was quickly covered with a wide smile and more sugary words. "That's lovely, however I'm afraid that our adoption process requires a twelve-week parenting course, and of course extensive background checks, and--,"

"What if the child in question is a blood relation to the adoptive parent?" Severus cut her off smoothly.

"Unless the person or persons wishing to adopt are the godparents, then the process is still the same, I'm afraid."

Elisa really did look as if she wished it would be simpler to get the child off her hands.

"I'll go you one better," Severus said drily, "I am this child's father. Run whatever tests you need to run to prove it, but I am taking her home with me, today."

Elisa didn't even bother to cover her shocked expression with sugary professionalism; Instead, she bounded towards the front of her building for her manager.

After both wizarding and Muggle paternity tests alike had proven that Severus Snape was indeed the father of "Chloe Smith", he did take the girl home that day, true to his word, and immediately had her name legally changed.

Since she was only in the orphanage records as Chloe, there was no need to fix any records regarding her first name, but he'd be damned if he would leave Bellatrix's name tailing the child like a curse.

From that day on, Calista Lestrange became Calista Snape, and she had a permanent home at last, with someone who was possibly as miserable as she herself was.


	2. Chapter One

**Always in Your Shadow**

Chapter One

Once he had rescued Calista, Severus was admittedly at a loss for what to _do_ with her. He knew nothing about parenting, and had had one of the worst examples possible.

Calista herself was no help; she knew even less about family dynamics than he did, and he still had yet to hear her utter a single word. Furthermore, staring into a small child's face that held his own eyes was frankly disconcerting to him.

He found himself wondering, in the back of his mind, if his daughter had inherited his natural talent for legilimancy. Several times in the first few days with her, he had forced himself to refrain from trying to read her memories; he had a feeling that this particular activity would severely set back any chances he had of getting the flighty little girl to trust him, but it was so frustrating that she would not communicate anything.

Most of the few people who had met Calista thought her quite simple, and attributed her silence to a lack of wits. Severus, on the other hand, was certain that the opposite was true; that the girl was indeed quite bright, but refused to speak.

He did not think that she was unable to speak, but felt that she must have reasons for simply refusing – after all, it had served her well, so far. Remembering his own childhood, Severus thought darkly that sometimes silence was safer than letting anyone know what thoughts you were capable of.

Some of Severus' assumptions about the girl were made based on arrogance. He didn't think a child of his could possibly be as simple as people seemed to believe Calista was.

However, he had also been observing her closely, and he noticed that she seemed drawn to books.

He remembered seeing her with one at the orphanage, and now that she was living with him in his professor's quarters at Hogwarts, she could often be found perusing his own shelves.

She never touched any of the books, perhaps out of the correct assumption that Severus did not like his things to be touched, but he felt certain that she understood the titles, and he swore that her eyes would linger for longer on some titles compared to others, as if she were gauging her interest in each topic.

Perhaps Severus had a cynical view of children, but he did not think that many other six-year-olds would be able to read the majority of the titles on his shelf.

Finally, after a week of steadfast silence from the child, Severus took down a volume from the shelf that he had often seen Calista's eyes lingering on. It was a book of theory, mostly concerning how potion-making differed from standard magic cast with a wand, and required a different set of skills as well as a different mindset.

He was familiar with the text, and knew it was quite a lofty read, with few illustrations, but perhaps that didn't matter.

He doubted that Calista would understand any of it yet, bright or not, but he was at a loss as to how to engage the child. She still had barely acknowledged him, and she shrank away from him ever so slightly whenever he drew close to her.

Severus sat down behind the desk in his office, and called back through the open doorway for Calista. A moment later, the child arrived as requested, but her gaze was trained on the rough stone floor.

"Calista," Severus intoned awkwardly, not really sure how to speak to a child, especially one that would not answer back. "Come here. I thought you might want to look at this book with me."

He could see the slight girl hesitating, before she stepped closer, still just out of arm's reach. Severus frowned at her, but she couldn't see it, with her eyes still cast down.

"You're too young to read this by yourself," he said awkwardly, "But I can read a little bit to you.. if you want…"

Irritated with himself for not knowing how to speak to his own daughter, he ended curtly, "Sit on that chair. I will read."

Calista stayed exactly where she was for a few seconds, before slowly doing as she was told, and settling on the room's only other chair.

Severus wasn't sure if her response was slow because she hadn't been paying attention, or if it was a deliberate attempt at disobedience. Against his instincts, he rather hoped it was the latter, for he had seen absolutely no other evidence that the girl had a backbone or a personality at all, save that one icy glare at the orphanage's worker.

Severus opened the heavy volume at random, and started to read aloud. Calista stared resolutely at her lap, and he had the distinct impression that she was not listening at all.

After ten minutes or so, he closed the cover of the book with an irritated snap, and looked at the child, still sitting exactly as she had been the whole time he was reading. With a hollow sigh, he waved his hand towards the door.

"You may go now, if you wish."

Before he even returned his gaze to her, she was gone as if she had never been in the office with him.

He stood and replaced the book, before retiring for the evening with the impression that he was living with a barely animated doll.

Every fibre of his being blamed Bellatrix, wondering what she could possibly have done to raise such a dull, miserable child. Perhaps she really _was_ as simple as everyone claimed.

Severus had almost forgotten about his failed attempt to connect with his daughter, until two weeks later, when he entered the study where his books were shelved, and saw Calista kneeling on the cold stone floor in front of the bookshelves, the heavy red volume he had been reading to her open and cradled carefully in her arms.

He opened his mouth with the intention of scolding her for touching his books without permission, but closed it again and decided not to announce his presence just yet.

He watched as her dark eyes roved rapidly across the pages, and it was clear that she was deeply absorbed in the volume. When he saw her turn a page, it was done so carefully that he could hardly fault her for not properly respecting his books.

He watched her for several minutes before turning and leaving the room silently.

_Let her read_, he thought to himself, _Perhaps it will give us something to communicate about._

So far, Severus had had precious little to bother making rules about, since Calista slept most of the time and was never in sight the time she _was_ awake, but he did insist upon them eating dinner together, mostly because she was startlingly thin and he doubted she would eat at all if there weren't someone watching her and making sure she did.

As they sat down for dinner that night, and Calista stared blankly and emotionlessly at her plate once more, he looked across the table at her and spoke.

"I saw you reading my book earlier," he said, and watched her head snap up more quickly than he had seen her do anything so far. He was startled by the look in her eyes, which was one of abject terror.

As quickly as he had time to see her expression, her dark eyes had been masked with a blank expression once more.

_So she does have some of my talent for occlumency_.

To see any exhibition of a skill this specialized in a child was very unusual, but children often expressed their magical ability in surprisingly strong ways when they were young.

"I'm not angry with you," Severus said slowly, "You were treating it well, although I would like you to ask before you read any of my books. Some of them are priceless, and most of them are not at all appropriate for you."

He paused, watching for some sign of expression on the girl's face, but there was none, so he continued.

"I can read more of that book with you, if you wish."

Calista stared at him for several seconds, before slowly shaking her head no. Then she rose from the table and disappeared from the room once more.

Severus didn't bother going after her; she was remarkably skilled at not being seen when she didn't want to be.

After their brief communication, which was certainly the furthest he had gotten with her in that department, he never once saw her anywhere near his bookshelf again. He did not know if she was respecting his wishes not to touch the books, or if she was avoiding anything that might allow them to start a conversation.

As she continued to walk around like a corpse, he began to seriously suspect the latter, and wondered angrily what Bellatrix had said or done to make his own daughter wish to have nothing to do with him at all.

**o-o-o-o-o**

One day about two months into Calista's stay with him, he did not catch sight of her once during the day, and she made no appearance at dinner.

After dinner, he searched the small dungeon apartment, but couldn't find her anywhere.

"Calista!" he called, a note of irritation entering his voice unintentionally.

He was so frustrated with her silences, her disappearances. He had waited six long years to meet her, and she didn't even acknowledge him most of the time.

When more silence greeted his call, just as he had expected, he stormed once more through the quarters, his cloak swishing behind him. He entered the small bedroom that he had given her, and drew his wand.

"_Lumos_," he muttered, and peered more thoroughly around the room.

This time, he made out a tiny form crouched at the far end of her bed, her back against the headboard. His frustration quickly changed to alarm as he heard the tiny whimpering sounds coming from where she sat curled tightly into a fetal position. It was the first time he had heard her make a sound, but he didn't have time to register the fact as he strode across the room, crouching down over her.

"Calista," he said urgently, "What happened? Are you hurt? What…?" he trailed off as he realized the small girl was asleep.

Her eyes were closed, and her fists clenched tightly. Beneath the papery eyelids, he could see her eyes moving rapidly back and forth. She was dreaming.

He reached out and touched her shoulder, and the girl started awake, her eyes snapping open to meet his gaze.

She was so distraught and still half-asleep, that he had access to her feelings and memories without even consciously trying to. He was swept along with her wild emotions by accident, a writhing mix of anger and hurt; there was an icy rage, far too cold to belong to a normal child, and there was an animal sense of fear, an ever-present instinct to _run, run, run_.

He tried to focus on her memories, but they were tangled up in the nightmare she had been having, and her emotions were so wild and strong that he could not focus on anything else.

Only seconds after he had begun to feel her tumultuous emotions, her eyes went blank and he could feel nothing, not without deliberately trying, and he knew she would feel the intrusion, and likely be even more afraid.

Instinctually, Severus pulled the child close to him, and held her there. He could feel her trembling, and as soon as he had pulled her into the embrace, her entire body stiffened, her nerves taut, as if preparing to bolt.

"Calista," he whispered urgently, "I will not hurt you."

The tiny girl only pulled away from him and closed her eyes, an all-too-deliberate way of telling him that he was not welcome to share her thoughts.


	3. Chapter Two

**Always in Your Shadow**

Chapter Two

That night, Severus was overcome with feelings that were new to him, and he didn't know what to make of them.

He had a powerful urge to protect Calista from further pain, and he wanted to know what had happened to her in the first place, to make her so afraid, and so angry. He surprised himself with his reaction to Calista's refusal to open up to him.

The strength of his feelings for Calista reminded him of the way he had felt about Lily, long ago, but when Lily had ultimately rejected him, he had been angry and bitter. This was different; maybe because she shared his blood, or maybe because he had learned from his mistakes, Calista's rejection made him want to earn her trust.

Severus hated what remained of his family, and had not spoken to them in years, and he had no one that he truly called a friend, except perhaps Dumbledore.

He had long since accepted the way he was, and he had thought this would never change, and it still hadn't… except for Calista. He wanted to be a part of her life, and he was frustrated that he didn't know how.

Severus was still Severus, though, and he wondered if his current feelings toward Calista would have been different had he not just experienced that brief moment caught up in her emotions.

Until that moment, Calista had not seemed, truly, to be the same child that he had wondered about for years, that he had been determined to find out was his. It was not until he had touched her mind that she became his daughter, truly.

There was something about the way Calista felt that reminded him powerfully of his own miserable, lonely childhood, and he realized he would do almost anything to spare Calista the same fate. He wanted her to feel safe, to smile. He wanted her to feel… loved.

Severus had no idea how he was going to accomplish that when he himself had no idea precisely what that felt like. He had loved, but had never been loved, not truly, in return.

His parents had set no example. How could he give his child something that he couldn't even comprehend?

Severus could not simply look at Calista as she huddled into herself, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, and remain calm.

Inside, he boiled with a fury that threatened to explode if he remained in the same room as her. At that moment, he was certain that Bellatrix had done something awful to this child, and he wanted to kill her.

Seeing his own flesh and blood so scarred made him feel as though Bellatrix had wounded him directly, and he was not one to let attacks go unpunished.

That night, he lay awake, fighting the urge to go back into Calista's room. He wanted to know, needed to know what else lay behind her dark eyes, like mirrors of his own.

Although he had never held the privacy of others in high regard before, he knew that forcing Calista to expose her mind to him would be a mistake, especially when she was in so fragile a state.

He would have to wait, and to earn her trust before he could know anything else about her.

Since he didn't sleep that night at all, he rose much earlier than he was prone to do, a dull headache pounding at his temples from the lack of sleep.

He needed coffee, or perhaps a very strong tea, and then he needed to find some way to approach Calista, but as he entered the small hearth room that held a fireplace for cooking, and a small wooden table with two chairs, he froze in the doorway. Calista was already in the room, and he watched her from the doorway, as silent as he could be.

Calista had dragged one of the wooden chairs over to the narrow work-top next to the fireplace, and was standing on its seat. She had an earthenware mug on the counter, and was pouring an aromatic black liquid into it.

The liquid steamed and hissed as it filled the cup, and he caught a strong smell of coffee. He watched, holding his silence, as she stepped down from the chair with the mug held carefully between her two hands, and set it gently on the table.

She returned to the chair, and leaned it against herself as she slowly pulled it back to the table. She held the chair a tiny bit off the floor, so it wouldn't make a sound, and he saw her pale face turn pink with the effort of holding up the chair, which probably weighed almost as much as she did.

Once she had returned the chair to its proper place, she approached the work-top, and standing on tiptoes, removed the now-empty carafe, washed it and dried it, and then put it back exactly where he usually kept it on the counter.

Finally, when the room looked exactly as it had before, save for the mug and the girl, she climbed into the chair and reached for the mug. Even though the liquid was still steaming and must have been quite hot, she sipped at it quickly, and had drained the mug in a matter of moments.

As soon as it was gone, she washed the mug and put it away, and wiped the tabletop off with the end of her sleeve. Then she looked slowly around the room, as if taking inventory of its contents.

When her eyes swept by the doorway in which Severus stood, he stepped quietly backwards into the shadows so she wouldn't see him. He had learned by now that approaching Calista when she thought she was alone would only send her bolting from the room, and he might not catch sight of her again all day.

It occurred to Severus that Calista was far too young to be drinking coffee, and that she must have been drinking it for quite some time to be taking it black and without sugar, not to mention scalding hot.

He wondered briefly where on earth she had acquired that habit, but then she was heading for the doorway and he swept away before he was discovered.

The next day, and the one following it, and for the next month's worth of days, he rose early, and watched silently from the doorway as Calista followed her morning routine.

She would be up by four in the morning, brewing a strong batch of coffee, and she would leave the room exactly as she had found it by four-thirty. From there, she would usually return to her bedroom, and since he had found her in the grip of a nightmare, she always closed it softly, not even allowing her father one glimpse of her until dinnertime, or so she thought.

Mealtimes were as they had always been, for he would be simmering with things he needed to say to her, and needed to hear her say, but she would always be silent and distant.

Not only did it make Severus feel inadequate as a parent, but he also grew increasingly frustrated. He wasn't making any progress at all, and in the meantime Calista was growing still thinner and more frail-looking, and she always had dark circles underneath her eyes.

He didn't understand how she could look so tired when she spent most of the day in her room, presumably sleeping, until he had been watching her in the mornings for a little over a month.

One afternoon, he stepped into the small kitchen to make himself some coffee. Since it was the middle of the day and Calista would not usually be within sight for a few hours still, he was surprised to find her in the small kitchen, sitting at the little table with yet another mug of coffee.

He forced himself to keep walking as though he hadn't even noticed her, and was surprised yet again when she didn't immediately bolt as he entered the room. He walked over to the counter and took down a second mug, and noticed there was still at least one cup's worth of coffee left in the carafe.

He turned his head slowly and said, in a soft voice,

"Calista, is it okay with you if I have some of this, too?"

He was careful to phrase his question in such a way that made it seem that he wasn't at all surprised to see her, or surprised that she had made coffee.

As soon as he spoke, she stiffened and he truly thought she was going to leave the room once more, but she sat still for a long moment, looking at him but not allowing their eyes to meet.

Finally, she nodded slowly, _yes_.

As if this was a normal occurrence, he filled his mug and brought it to the table, sitting across from her.

He wanted to speak to her, to see if he could finally coax a reply, but he didn't want to push his luck just yet, so instead he made a show of focusing on his coffee, even when every sense but his vision was focused on the small girl across the table from him.

Calista did not stay in the room long. She finished her coffee, washed her mug and put it away, and then washed the now-empty carafe and put it carefully away, too. Then, silently, she left the room, and he didn't see her again until dinnertime, which was silent as usual, despite his awkwardly offering her once more to read to her from the book she seemed to enjoy.

The next morning, Severus awoke as usual just after four, and made his way to the kitchen doorway.

He nearly dropped his jaw in shock when he saw that there were _two_ mugs of steaming coffee on the table, and that Calista was already in her chair, her legs drawn up underneath her to keep her bare toes warm.

It only took him a second to compose himself, and he entered the room with a controlled expression, settling at the table as if this was something they did every day. He sipped at his coffee, and restrained himself to only one sentence:

"Thank you for the coffee, Calista."

She didn't reply, but she rose from her chair and took both of their empty mugs to the basin and washed them.

When she approached his chair to take his mug, he scarcely dared to breathe, for this was the closest that his daughter had ever voluntarily been to him. She was quick as she took his mug and scurried across the room before he really had a chance to think of what he might say.

Day after day, Severus arose early to find two mugs set at the table. He forced himself not to speak to her much, and on the few days when he did, she would leave the room abruptly, pausing only to wash her mug.

He found it strange that she was so insistent upon leaving the room exactly as she found it, now that he obviously knew what she was up to in the kitchen.

It occurred to him that this careful, tentative alliance with Calista was something like trying to tame a wild animal. He had to be patient and quiet, and she would sit for a little bit longer before she disappeared from sight.

His careful silence paid off sooner than he thought it would. One morning as he finished his coffee, he thought about remaining in the kitchen a little longer, but decided that it might make Calista uncomfortable, and so he rose from the table, and walked down the stone hallway.

He sensed rather than saw that Calista was a few paces behind him, following him like a tiny, silent shadow. He reached a doorway and opened it, revealing a rough stone staircase that descended into darkness.

He lit his wand and turned to invite Calista to follow him downstairs, but she was already gone again. With a heavy sigh, he descended the stairs himself, emerging into his favorite room in the apartment.

In the center of the vast, cavernous room a fireplace stood, waiting to be lit, and on a high table behind it there were several cauldrons in different sizes, and around the room were shelves of potion ingredients in bottles, and even more shelves of books, most of these stained with age and use.

He spent the rest of the day in his workroom, and didn't realize he had missed dinnertime until Calista must already have gone to bed.

Softly, he climbed the stairs and walked down the hallway to her bedroom. The door was open only a crack, and he pushed it open further silently, wanting to at least look in on her before he went to bed.

She turned her head as light from the hall spilled across the floor of her room, and all at once Severus understood exactly why Calista was so tired-looking, and why she drank black coffee all day long.

Calista was sitting on her bed, her back flat against the headboard, and her thin arms wrapped around her knees, that were tucked under her chin.

She stared straight ahead, her eyes wide open, and he saw a trickle of blood running down her chin as she pressed her teeth ruthlessly into the soft skin of her lower lip, fighting all of her instincts to sleep.

Calista was so fragile-looking because she _wasn't_ sleeping all day; she wasn't, in fact, sleeping at all. She spent her days and nights forcing herself to stay awake, and Severus remembered the wave of dark feelings he had felt when he woke her up from her dream. She was afraid to sleep, because she was afraid of the nightmares that would follow her.

Severus lit his wand and sent the light to the candelabra that stood in the corner of the small room.

In the thin light, her face looked even paler and more sickly than usual, her eyes looking huge in the tiny face, their deep recesses lined with dark smudges. She looked frankly pitiful, and he could not stand to watch her struggle to stay awake through the night.

"Come with me, Calista," he said softly, "I can give you something that will make you sleep without dreams."

He could see the struggle in her features as her hesitance to trust anyone warred with her desperate need to sleep.

Finally, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood. He reached out, tentatively, his hand open for her to take. She stared at his hand for a minute, and then shook her head, almost imperceptibly. Still, she followed him as he left the room, all the way through the kitchen and the living room, and into his office.

He had a few sleeping draughts of various potencies already made, for he sometimes had difficulty sleeping as well. His eyes swept over the ones on the shelf.

There was a fairly mild one that would likely keep the dreamer from remembering any of their dreams in the morning, and he knew that this was probably the only thing he had that might be okay to give to a child. He reached for it, and at the last second shifted his aim, taking a smaller bottle filled with a deep purple liquid.

Night Blossom draught was much stronger stuff. It would knock someone out in less than a minute, and they'd likely sleep twelve hours or more without stirring. It often made the drinker groggy and fuzzy-headed, and it most certainly didn't allow even enough thought for a meaningless dream.

Anyone who took a draught of that particular potion would see absolutely nothing during the time they slept.

He knew that Night Blossom was a powerful ingredient that was carefully controlled, and he knew he definitely shouldn't give anything with Night Blossom in it to a child, but he also knew that he had promised his daughter a dreamless sleep, and that she had decided to trust him.

He would not take any chances. He would make good on his promise, because it might be the only chance he got in a long time to show her that he could be trusted.

He unscrewed the bottle's cap and poured just a few drops onto her tongue.

As soon as he had screwed the cap back on and replaced the bottle on the shelf, Calista's eyelids began to droop, and she swayed where she stood.

He reached out for her again, watching her as he did so for signs that she would once again dart away from him. Instead, her eyes closed, and he barely had time to grab her to stop her from falling.

She didn't react to his touch at all, so he picked her up carefully, holding her to his shoulder. For a moment, he simply stood still, hardly daring to breathe.

He had never understood why people wanted to have children in the first place, had never felt a bond to his own parents.

Now, with the warm weight of his daughter resting on his shoulder, her even breathing tickling his neck, he thought he was beginning to understand. He could think of very little at that very moment that could be as precious as the little girl that slept in his arms, and he closed his eyes, simply holding her for several minutes.

At last, he carried her back to her room and laid her gently on her bed. He watched her a few minutes more, marveling at the change in her features.

She looked so peaceful, her dark hair spread in tangles over the pillow. She breathed evenly, and there was no sign of dreaming at all in he relaxed form.

Without her carefully guarded eyes staring back at him, he thought she looked very delicate and vulnerable. She looked almost innocent, as if she had not been touched by whatever tragedy had caused her to shy away from everything and everyone.

Severus vowed that he would not let anything hurt her, ever again. He _would_ save her from a childhood like his own.


	4. Chapter Three

**Always in Your Shadow**

Chapter Three:

Calista slept for over twenty-four hours under the influence of the potent Night Blossom draught. When Severus at last heard her beginning to stir at about six in the morning, he went into the kitchen and brewed a batch of coffee.

By the time Calista had risen, he was sitting at the table, two mugs ready, waiting for her. She looked at him for a moment before crossing the room to sit across from him at the table.

Her mouth opened slightly, and for a second he wondered if she was going to say something to him at last, but then she gave a wide yawn, and rubbed her eyes with tiny, balled fists. Apparently, she had not completely shaken off the effects of the potion.

"Did you sleep better?" he asked, looking into his mug to keep from startling her. He still felt extremely awkward about speaking to someone that would never reply.

She looked up, sleep still clouding her eyes, and nodded up and down.

Her eyelids were still half-closed, and she drained half her coffee mug in one sip. Severus was once again struck by the thought that it probably wasn't very healthy to have a six-year-old downing coffee, but he wasn't bothered enough to stop her from drinking it. He seriously doubted that consuming too much caffeine would have as much of a harmful effect on her as Bellatrix's parenting evidently had.

"Good," he said finally, "I'm glad that it helped."

He knew his voice sounded strained, but he was in uncharted territory. He couldn't be himself with the child, because he was still trying to get her to open up, to trust him. He knew that he wasn't always the most considerate of people, and he doubted that Calista would understand the difference between him being irritated and him just plain disliking someone, at least not yet.

Giving Calista a drop of Night Blossom potion at night became as much of a routine as their morning coffee, and Severus knew that he would eventually have to wean her off the potion, and that it wouldn't be easy, but for now he was just glad that she was sleeping.

Already, she looked healthier, her eyes not so shadowed, and she had more energy. She still wouldn't communicate beyond nodding yes or no, but she had all but ceased to leave the room when he entered it, and if he asked her a direct yes or no question, there was about a fifty-fifty chance of her responding.

Soon, the Hogwarts school year began, and he was busy during the day teaching Potions classes. Because he was one of the harshest professors at Hogwarts, even in his early years there, he was often busy at night too, supervising detentions.

Strangely enough, the less he was around, the more time Calista spent in the same room as him. She began to linger after dinner, sometimes following him silently to his office, where she sat in the spare chair while he graded papers.

She was always so quiet that he sometimes forgot she was there, and he'd be surprised to look up hours later, and see Calista's dark eyes watching his quill move across the lines of another student essay.

One night, after setting the last of the graded papers aside, he looked at Calista, who looked as though she was about to fall sleep in her chair. It was well past midnight, and the little girl had been awake since dawn.

"Calista? Would you like me to read to you from that book before bed?"

He often asked this question, and she always shook her head no, but he asked anyway.

This time, he was surprised when she nodded a tentative _yes_, and he swept out of the office to return with the large red volume he had read to her from before. He wasn't sure how far she had read in the book, so he opened to a chapter in the middle, and began to read.

She mostly looked at the desk or the floor, but at one point in his reading, she sat up straight, suddenly alert, and she looked directly at him while he read.

"_There have been several recorded examples over the centuries of Squibs and non-magical persons related to a witch or wizard performing feats in this branch of magic. Of course, successfully brewing a potion requires extensive knowledge of the magical ingredients used, but if a well-schooled person of non-magical blood finds the right ingredients, it is not impossible for them to follow a recipe and create an effective potion. Most recorded examples of this are concerned with simple potions, such as a draught able to cure boils or irritate the skin, but precious few have achieved success with moderately complicated potions. Most of these were marketed in the sixteenth through nineteenth century as 'Miracle Elixirs', sold at high costs to Muggles with no knowledge of the wizarding world. Such potions often claimed to restore hearing to a deaf person, or return mobility to a handicapped person, but the vast majority of these Elixirs were merely All-purpose vigor-inducing potions, that would occasionally increase auditory or muscular function, but the effects of these potions seldom lasted more than six hours. Purveyors of these rudimentary potions were ironically referred to as "witch doctors". Thus, it is the field of potion making that has the distinction of being the only branch of magic that does not necessarily require wizarding blood to perform."_

He would have read on, but a yawn suddenly stretched the little girl's face, and he closed the book to give her a drop of sleeping draught and put her to bed.

The next day, while on a two-hour recess between classes, Severus retreated to his workroom to experiment with variations on a Catseye Concoction. The potion, named for its key ingredient, would turn the drinker into a cat for a few hours, and he was curious as to whether the potion could be adapted to affect other transformations.

So far, he had no luck using a bat's eye or a rat's eye, but he was interested to see what would happen with a newt's eye. As he worked, he faintly heard small feet coming down the stairs, and he kept working, pretending he hadn't noticed. Within moments, he had acquired a small, dark-haired shadow at his side, and she watched him stir the contents of the cauldron.

He murmured the list of ingredients to himself as he added them, and after a few moments Calista disappeared.

He frowned briefly, but remained focused on his work. He was almost there. All he needed to do now was find Terag Leaves in the right phase of decomposition, and then add the key ingredient.

He knew he had the damned leaves somewhere, but he couldn't find the right jar. He muttered the name of the ingredient to himself as he searched nearby shelves for it, and after a moment he sensed Calista's presence nearby again.

He glanced back at her, and smiled. She was holding out the very jar he was looking for, a rather proud expression on her face.

It was one of the few readable expressions she had exhibited in his company, and he made sure to thank her for bringing him the ingredient he had been searching for.

Calista made several more trips down to his workroom while he was busy experimenting with potions, and more and more frequently she would listen as he listed ingredients, and go off in search of them.

She seemed to enjoy helping him in the workroom, and she never once brought him the wrong thing. Typically, Severus didn't like anyone rummaging around on his shelves, but he decided to let his feelings on the matter go in this instance, because it was the closest thing to bonding that they shared, and he was actually glad for her company.

After Calista had brought him every single one of the twelve ingredients needed for a potion he would be teaching the fourth years in class the next day, he happened to glance back at her as she watched him stir the cauldron.

"Would you like to stir it?" he offered, and she nodded _yes_, ducking her head shyly.

He reached over and picked her up so she could reach the work-top, and felt her stiffen, her heart racing. He held her in front of the bubbling cauldron, and murmured in her ear.

"It's all right, Calista. I've told you, I won't hurt you. Go ahead and stir the potion."

She reached out and grasped the wooden spoon he had been using, and swirled it around inside the cauldron, watching the bubbles grow smaller. She imitated exactly the way he had been stirring it, and after a few moments he felt her body relax slightly as she stirred the potion. When Severus judged it was close to finished, he placed her down gently, and quickly finished the potion.

"I daresay you've done better than most of my students will," he said wryly, "And they've got about eight years on you."

By now, he didn't expect Calista to respond, and he was temporarily resigned to her silence. At least the distance between them seemed to be closing, albeit at a sluggish pace, but he still knew next to nothing about her past.

It was after they had finished another chapter in the book one night, when she was watching him clear his desk off for the night, that he looked at her and asked her suddenly:

"Do you trust me, Calista?"

She seemed jolted by the question, and licked her lower lip, which still carried faint indentations from all the nights she had bitten down on it to keep herself awake. He waited, but she neither responded or left the room, and he sighed.

"I want you to trust me. I wish you would speak to me."

He had run out of ways to approach the child besides frankness.

Calista kept her eyes on his face, but skillfully avoided making direct eye contact, and while it appeared that she was listening to him, she offered no response, not even a nonverbal one.

After a few minutes of stony silence, he gave up and offered her a small amount of the lightest of his sleeping draughts. He had been slowly mixing the Night Blossom draught with a much milder solution, but this was the first time he hadn't given her any of the former at all. He hoped she would be able to sleep without being woken by nightmares.

The next morning, Calista was unusually fidgety, and she looked tired. He suspected that she hadn't slept much, but when he asked her if she had slept well, she nodded and returned to her coffee.

He gave her the same potion the next night, and for several nights afterward, and he was starting to hope that it would suffice. Truthfully, she shouldn't have remained dependant on any sleeping draught for so long, but he was at a loss for what else to do, since he didn't even know precisely what was causing her nightmares, and she wouldn't tell him.

After a week of the weaker draught, he heard tiny, breathy whimpers coming from behind her bedroom door as he walked past, and he slipped into her room to find her in the grip of another nightmare.

He laid his hand on her shoulder, and called her name a few times, but she would not wake up. Finally, he gripped her shoulders firmly and shook her gently.

"Calista!" he said impatiently, and her eyes snapped open.

This time, he could not restrain himself. He had to know.

He placed his hands on either side of her face, and stared into her eyes.

"Look at me," he commanded, "Don't close your eyes."

Calista obeyed, perhaps simply due to the forceful tone of his voice, a tone he had never used with her.

Enough was enough. He needed to know what caused her nightmares, why she was so silent, what was behind the furor of emotions he knew swirled within her mind.

Although her eyes stayed open, he watched as a familiar transitioned occurred within them.

As if she had thrown a switch, a carefully blank look came into her eyes, and he sensed a barrier over her thoughts. However, she was only a child and he was very skilled in this art; he pushed through her barrier as easily as one could sweep cobwebs away from a window.

Once again, he was caught in the seething stream of unpleasant emotions, but he attempted to look through them and focus on the memories attached to the feelings.

He was startled to find that he could not focus; the sheer strength of her emotions overpowered anything else, and he realized that he would have to follow the path of the feelings themselves to find out what caused them.

Calista's eyelids began to close, but he threw caution to the winds, and moved his thumbs to her eyelids, holding them open. He had to know.

He had never entered so young a child's mind before, and he found it was different than what he was used to.

Where searching an adult's mind was a matter of finding pictures, sounds, and feelings that connected, Calista's young mind was at once more simplified and more complex; he found himself envisioning a dark room which he stood in the center of, and in the far corner, he could see the small form of Calista huddled into herself, like she did when dreaming.

He tried to walk towards her, but he was bombared suddenly by streams of vibrant colours. When he tried to focus on one of the colours, all of the streams became words that assaulted his ears in phrases.

The red and orange ones were harsh, and seemed to be spoken in many different voices, some of which he recognized and some which he didn't.

"_You will serve the Dark Lord; it is what you are born to do."_

"_Freak. Why don't you talk? Are you stupid?"_

"_She is only a child. I could not leave her there."_

"_Something is wrong. She does not speak. Children should speak."_

"_I will not listen to so much as a whimper of protest from you. You will learn that little girls do not question their mothers and go unscathed."_

"_Say it! Say it, or I will turn the wand on you."_

"_Give Mama her wand. Do it now!"_

"_Wretched child. You disgrace me."_

"_We can't keep her here. She puts us all at risk because of who she is related to."_

"_If you fail to please the Dark Lord, I will kill you myself. It will be a small loss."_

It was only because of the depth of Severus' own negative emotions and experiences that he could stand to follow these streams of words, and he listened until the reds and oranges faded, having had their say. They went on for quite some time, all in the same vein.

Finally, other words emerged, these ones a soft, pulsing blue, and spoken barely above a whisper in a voice that was utterly unfamiliar.

"_I won't do what you say. You can't make me."_

"_If I can do nothing at all, then at least I can do nothing bad."_

"_Don't hurt me anymore."_

"_If no one can touch me, then no one can hurt me."_

"_If only you would kill me, but I know you are not so merciful."_

"_Leave me alone."_

"_The only reason you don't hate me is because you don't know me, and I will keep it that way as long as I can."_

"_No one can find this out. It is not safe for anyone to know."_

The words faded in and out of his hearing, the voice whispery but determined, and he realized with a start that he was hearing all of his daughter's unspoken words.

The longer he listened, the more words there were, as if her mind had been filled to the brim with all of the things she never said, and the pressure was being released just in time.

He focused on the blue streams of colour, and the words kept coming.

"_Think me daft. Then you won't expect it when I turn on you."_

"_I don't believe anything you tell me."_

"_Lies. Everything you say is a lie."_

"_You have a serpent's tongue, and blood alone does not make you my mother."_

…

Eventually, the words faded, although they still kept coming.

He strained to keep a focus on them, but then he was distracted by the last group of colours, the greens and yellows, whose volume slowly rose to drown out all of the other words in Calista's mind.

He was startled to hear his own voice, repeating all the things he had said to her over the last few months.

"_I won't hurt you."_

"_Would you like me to read to you from the book again?"_

"_I will give you something that will let you sleep without dreams."_

"_I would like you to ask permission before taking any more of my books."_

"_Would you like to stir the cauldron?"_

"_I wish you would speak to me."_

"_Do you trust me?"_

"_Calista."_

"_Calista."_

"_Calista."_

Her name, spoken in his voice, echoed around the now-quiet room. The swirls of colour continued, but they now swept along the perimeter of the room, and he was able to cross the room to where Calista still sat huddled.

His dream-self, if that was what you would call it, lifted the child's chin and peered into her eyes, the same way he did with the flesh-and-blood Calista that was before him.

He felt pressed upon by the bursts and flames of her vivid emotions, and he reached for the first one that came close to him; it was the icy rage he had felt within her once before.

He focused all of his energy on staying connected to that feeling, and watched as it revealed memory after memory.

"_Stupid girl. Useless child. The Dark Lord will never be impressed with you, the pitiful way you act." Bellatrix's eyes glared, glittering with certain madness._

"_I don't want to impress your Dark Lord," Calista replied hotly, and before the words had left her mouth, Bellatrix had slapped her across the face, hard enough to send the child stumbling backwards. Her cheek ached and stung, but she would not give Bellatrix the pleasure of seeing her cry. Instead, she spat at her mother's feet, and imagined returning the strike, leaving her own mark on Bellatrix's pasty cheek._

_The helpless man writhed in agony, as Bellatrix pointed her wand at him, her eyes dark with concentration, her face contorted by a frighteningly cold grin. A few times, she shook the wand in emphasis, and the man screamed, splitting the still night sky with sounds of sheer agony. Calista wanted to look away, but she knew it would make Bellatrix angrier, would cause worse visions than she would be spared by turning away. Calista's stomach felt hollow and her head swam as Bellatrix turned, and placed the wand into her own small hand. "I will cast the spell," Bellatrix said, "You point the wand. Point it at the wretched filthy creature. Calista's eyes locked on the man, and he stared at her with wide brown eyes. "Please… help… me…" he beseeched, and Calista was disgusted at the sight of him, the spittle dripping from his chin, the way he crawled on the ground. Then she looked up into her mother's face, and she felt sick. The eyes glittered with a malicious pleasure, and her face was lit by madness. "Point the wand," Bellatrix urged, "Do it now." Calista closed her eyes and yanked her hand away from her mother's icy grip. She couldn't stand this, any of it. She hated her mother, she hated the pathetic man on the ground, she hated herself._

_Calista sat hunched over on a small, uncomfortable bunk, a book cradled in her lap. She was so absorbed in what she was reading that she was caught off-guard, didn't notice the two light-haired girls tiptoeing into the room, until it was too late. One of the girls grabbed a fistful of Calista's dark hair and pulled as hard as she could, and the other girl spit in Calista's face as she was pulled backwards by the first girl. The first girl shoved the book aside, and Calista saw, as if in slow motion, the book's pages separating from the cover and settling in a disorganized pile on the ground. "Freak!" the taller of the two girls, both of whom were at least three years Calista's senior, shrieked, "Stupid dirty black-eyed freak!" The second girl stomped on Calista's hand and leaned into her face, yelling along with the first girl. "Why don't you talk, freak? Why don't you tattle on us? Are you too scared? Are you scared they'll kick you out of here and make you live by yourself on the street, where freaks belong?"_

"_Look at me, you wretched child. Look at me, let me see what traitorous thoughts are in your head." Bellatrix leered at Calista, pushing the small child against the wall and staring into her eyes. Calista shut her eyes, and Bellatrix slapped her, sending her head reeling against the wall. She saw stars, felt herself fight to stay conscious, but she knew she had to, if she was to keep her mother out of her thoughts. She concentrated on clearing her mind, on keeping all of the things she wanted to shout at her mother behind an imaginary shield, schooled her expression into remaining blank. She must have done a good job, because Bellatrix loosened her grip and stalked away, leaving Calista feeling weak and drained from the effort of maintaining her mental barrier._

_A table swam into view, a round wooden table, and around it were familiar faces. Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, James and a pregnant Lily Potter all stared at Calista. Each wore a grim expression, and Potter raised his voice slightly as he addressed Black. "She can't stay here. She's got to go back to her mother. It's too risky to keep her with any of us, it could lead Voldemort straight to us." Black slammed his fist on the table, and snarled at his best friend. "She's related to me, too, and I can't just let Bella torture her. She's still a child, James!" He glanced at Calista, who was intently studying the tabletop, for fear of revealing her expression to any of the strangers who sat there discussing her as if she wasn't in the room. Lily leaned towards Calista and asked softly if she was hungry. Even though she was, she didn't trust herself to answer without suddenly crying, and she didn't want any of these strange people to see her cry. Lily kept speaking softly to her, and Calista stared at her rounded belly. She heard Lily talk about expecting her own child, and Calista suddenly wished strongly that this pretty, soft-spoken red-haired lady was her mother, instead of Bellatrix. She had no siblings, and her mother never spoke to her kindly, never asked if she wanted anything, not like this lady was asking. Calista was certain that this woman would never torture a man to death, would never hand Calista her wand, insisting that she do the same. Then the black-haired man with glasses that sat next to her said something to the lady, and she turned away. She didn't say anything else to Calista the whole night, even though Calista was scared and hungry, and she didn't know where she was or who these people were._

Severus wanted to hold on to the image of Lily, but he didn't want to lose his place in Calista's memories, and when he felt a tendril of another wild emotion reaching towards him, he seized upon it, and followed it as he had followed the first.

This was different, encapsulating, all-invading. It was an instinctual, persistent sense of terror, and the images it revealed were far more disturbing than he ever could have imagined.

They were different in another way, too. Where all of the memories he had seen so far had a logical, picture-like quality to them, these came in jolts and bursts, many without real words or pictures at all.

These memories were raw and wild, and they connected in a brutal, forceful way.

_Red, red. Blood, so much blood. More than one man could hold in his body, and it is all over her hands. Thick, hot, shameful. She wipes her hands on the grass but the stains are still all over her fingers, screaming red stains. More hands, her mother's. They grip her own tightly, and her mother's hands are bloodier even than her own. The larger hands are cold, despite being soaked with blood, and they grip her small fingers so tightly that she can't break free. Mother's hands shove daughter's hands cruelly into the wound that splits the dead man's throat in two._

"_See what happens when you don't mind your mother? You see? You're next, you're next, and I will offer your blood to the Dark Lord in sacrifice…"_

"_He will use you, no matter what you say or do. He will use you alive, he will use you dead. That is what you are here for. That is why I gave you life."_

_Disobey. She disobeys again because she can't do what Mother asks. Mother is angry, her eyes flash. She lifts her wand and the world turns black and red, pulsing violently._

_Screaming, but it won't stop. Agony, everywhere. Her eyes, her hands, every nerve in her body is on fire. She feels a thousand hot knives stabbing her, twisting serrated blades into every muscle, every bone._

_She wants to sleep, she wants to die, but the agony is in control, won't release her. Cannot stop it, her throat raw from screaming and now her mouth is open but there is no voice left inside of her. It hurts, it hurts so badly…_

_The flash of a silver blade, and her feet won't carry her away fast enough. The searing of fire, white-hot. Anything, anything but this, the ultimate humiliation. She will never escape, not when his mark burns upon her skin. Mother is right. She will be used, alive or not._

_Again and again, the agony comes. She has angered Mother many times. Other times, Mother is angry at someone else, something else, but Daughter is there, and Daughter succumbs to the pain, kneeling when she would rather stand in defiance, screaming for mercy when she would rather shout in protest. She wants to die, because death will be numb. No more, please no more… her tiny body can't take it, but Mother won't let her sleep, won't let her mind fade blissfully into unawareness, because she has not learned the Lesson yet. She will never learn the Lesson, she is too Stupid. Defiant, wretched. Fire, searing at her insides. Blood is not dry yet, drips down her back, an agonizing freezing sensation against the white-hot flames that consume her from within. The cuts hurt the most, but Daughter knows they hurt from shame more than blood._

_Set me free… I cannot take any more._

* * *

Severus could not delve any further into her memories, no matter how capable his skills were of such a feat. He could not stand to see any more, but he would not leave Calista alone with her awful memories.

Slowly, he rose from the depths of her mind, until he stood again in the little room just behind her feeble barrier. His dream-self faced the dream-Calista, pulled her into his arms and held her tight.

He ignored the trembling of her body, restrained her when she tried to run away. He simply held her tight, wordlessly, and used the power of his own mind, his legilimancy skill to create a small, tight barrier that shielded them both from the contents of her mind, before he allowed himself to leave.

When at last Severus emerged from her memories, his hands slid down her face, her neck, and then he pulled her tightly to him in an embrace, much as he had done while he had sheltered her, temporarily, from the burden of her own memories.

Just as she had done in her mind, she trembled and strained to pull away, but he would not let her go. He held onto her, and when tears began to fall involuntarily from her eyes, he laid her head gently against his shoulder, and he held her there until the tears subsided, and neither of them spoke.

After more than an hour had passed, he loosened his grip on Calista slightly, and peered over her shoulder as he pushed the material of her nightdress aside, revealing her back.

He dreaded what he would see, but he forced himself to look, to find the spot that had bled and felt cold in Calista's darkest memories.

There, halfway down her back, he saw that someone had hacked at the child's skin, had used a blade to carve a crude replica of the Dark Mark across her spine. It was not as clear as the image that was branded into his own forearm, but it was not difficult to make out what the cuts and slashes represented.

This was worse than he ever could have imagined. With the Dark Mark carved into her skin, Voldemort would have no trouble locating her if he ever returned to power, and neither would Bellatrix.


	5. Chapter Four

**Always In Your Shadow**

Chapter Four:

Severus paced back and forth in his workroom. This was his favorite place to think, the place where he felt most comfortable.

Upstairs, Calista slept soundly, he knew. It was a strain on his own mind, the protective barriers he had placed in her mind to shield her from herself, and he could not keep her in the dark like that forever.

There was a reason why every book on the subject of legilimancy carried strong cautions about trying to alter things in someone else's mind; not only was it taxing beyond measure, but it was highly dangerous to the person whose mind you were inside of, as well.

If your guard slipped for even a second, the barrier you had placed could be crushed beneath the force of restrained emotions, and there was no telling what would happen to the other person.

Modifying someone's memory was always tricky at best, and in a case where a legilimens was manipulating the way the mind naturally operated, there was a high risk.

He knew that if he shielded Calista for too long, the weight of her memories would eventually press in on her and quite possibly destroy her mind altogether; Or, she could simply decide to drift away from herself permanently. For this reason, Severus kept his mind focused on Calista's, even as he paced a floor below.

Damn it. It was so hard to think when part of his concentration was elsewhere. It was a tax on his brain to process all of the things he had learned from perusing Calista's memories.

There was far more than the obvious to contend with, far more than the harsh memories and out-of-control emotions that battled each other within her. There were other things that Severus had felt only hints of, shadows that crawled around the edges of her memories, serpents that slithered by too quickly to catch, but long enough to cast alarming shadows.

There were puzzle pieces, things he had only barely sensed. In an adult mind, breaking from the conscious to the subconscious was defined by a barrier of some kind; in a child's, or at least in Calista's, it was more as if the subconscious flitted at the edges of the conscious, always threatening to slip in and leak its poison, but never quite near enough to examine and make sense of.

He swooped around like a bat in his workroom, his robes brushing past rows of books and bottles. He had to think. He had to make sense of the jumbled pieces that fit together to make what he had seen in his daughter. She bore the Dark Mark, but since it was not the true design, and had not been set there by Riddle himself, he did not yet know what implications the rough tattoo held for her. He would have to research that later, but for now…

She was already far more like him than he thought either one of them had realised. An outcast neglected and abused by her caregivers, she harbored a bank of deep, frighteningly intense rage, and it was terrifyingly close to the surface. She hid it well, for although Severus was able to break past her barriers without much trouble, he knew from her memories that Bellatrix had not been able to do so. He remembered that Bellatrix was slightly better at occlumency than she was at legilimancy, and that, while she may have had some talent in both fields, she lacked the focus required to truly make use of either gift.

While Severus had seen Bellatrix do some shockingly disturbing things and laugh about them afterwards, he had harbored some hope that she would feel enough of a bond to her own child that she would treat her more humanely. He was not terribly surprised at the portrayal of Bellatrix he found in the child's memories, but he had not envisioned quite the hell the child had gone through at her mother's hands. The Cruciatus Curse… she had survived it many times over, but he had sensed with each memory that her tenuous grip with the world was growing weaker and weaker.

He knew she must have extraordinary strength of will and determination to have made it through so much with her sanity still mostly intact, but the battle was long from over. She had clearly suffered an immense amount of damage from Bellatrix's cruel games, and was still traumatised. One thing was for certain; seeing Calista's memories, feeling the things she had felt, had given him a lot of insight into precisely who she was, and he was at a loss to explain why so many thought her witless. Not only had she been bright enough to see all the flaws in Bellatrix's twisted teachings, but the things she thought in conjunction with her bitterest memories of her mother were cunning and often scathing.

Severus had been on the right track when he theorised that Calista kept silent because it had often proved the track of safety throughout her young years. Part of it was that, but he realised that her other motive was simple; she had learned that the less she spoke, the less often she was noticed, and the more often she was free to glean information from her surroundings when no one remembered she was there.

This in itself impressed Severus, for it was something he had learned in his own youth, and it had served him well over the years. And yet, he had assumed that Calista had been silent so long that it was now second nature to her, but drifting through her feelings had proven his original assumptions wrong. Calista was bursting at the seams with things to say, but consciously made the decision not to say any of them. She refrained from speech both as a form of invisibility and a form of protection.

There were two secrets that loomed in Calista's mind that were coursing through her thoughts constantly, anguishing her. One, he had discovered in the slashes on her back, but the other he had sensed only in pieces. There was something that she knew that she believed would be dangerous for anyone else to find out about. Severus strained his mind, trying to remember what else he had seen and felt.

She had begun to believe, despite herself, that she was stupid, after all. She felt she lacked something. She had a strange bitter sort of triumphant thought that she could never become what Bellatrix wanted her to become, not by force, but that same knowledge was haunting Calista, because she knew it would only be a matter of time before someone finally figured out…

Finally figured out that she…

Severus concentrated on the things he had seen, on the things he had learned about his daughter.

It was only a matter of time before someone finally figured out that she was… that she couldn't…

And then it hit him. The piece he was missing. There had been a flash of a vision of a page of writing. A page from his book, the red book that they had read together.

Another piece of the puzzle emerged. Calista's small, slender hand being gripped by a larger one with a determined strength, around the smooth grip of a wand. _Cast the spell_, Bellatrix had urged, but she _could not_. She might have considered obeying simply to leave this awful place, this awful moment, but she _could not do it_, and Mother must never know that there was more than her plain refusal keeping her from following orders…

He remembered one of the unspoken phrases he had encountered in Calista's own words.

_The only reason you don't hate me is because you don't know me, and I will keep it that way as long as I can. _

The secret that Calista had desperately needed to conceal from Bellatrix still haunted her, and she was desperate, absolutely _desperate_ to conceal it from Severus as well. He remembered the slow flurry of feelings that swirled around him as he had listened to his own voice address Calista.

At first, he had not noticed any of it, so absorbed was he in the words of others that even in her own psyche, Calista was hard to hear. She had formed a tentative bond with Severus, had found comfort in being his assistant when he brewed draughts in his workroom, in their shared moments across the table from one another. But Calista was hiding from him. There was something she would give anything to keep from him…

When the final piece of the puzzle fit snugly into place, Severus threw his head back and laughed bitterly.

_This_ was what had kept Calista so distant from him? If only he had known…

All this time, she had wanted to trust him, wanted to believe that he wouldn't hurt her, but she had not dared get close enough for him to guess her secret. She had left rooms abruptly and disappeared for hours at a time not because she didn't like him, but because she _did_, and was afraid that he would despise her if he learned anything about her.

The strange thing was, she was not afraid of him learning about her previous humiliation at the hands of her peers, or the cruel way in which Bellatrix had treated her; No, there was something far more base that she was afraid would turn him against her, and once he realised what it was, he could not help but laugh mirthlessly.

Two at a time, he mounted the stairs, streaming through his dungeon flat like a strange, oversized bat. He had to speak to Calista at once.


	6. Chapter Five

**Always In Your Shadow**

Chapter Five:

Severus pushed open the heavy oak door of Calista's small bedroom, and sat on the edge of her bed. With a flick of his wand, he lit the candelabra. He did not need to touch her to wake her up; she was sleeping so soundly only because he was inside her mind, protecting her from remembering.

Slowly, he lifted his presence from her mind, taking the barrier he had created with it. He was careful to extract himself slowly enough that he would not damage her by sending a tide of repressed memories flooding at her.

Not a moment after he had disconnected from her entirely, her eyes flew open again, and there was a stricken look in them, as if she had just reawakened from a terrible nightmare.

Severus watched her slowly take stock of where she was and who she was with, and as he expected, he saw a translucent mask slide over her eyes, and it was all he could do to keep from smirking. For a fairly bright child, she could be remarkably blind sometimes.

"Calista."

He intoned evenly, his eyes fixed on her, measuring her reactions. He could feel the fear radiating from her, the dread and anxiety that he might have uncovered her secret, but to her credit very little of that was reflected in her gaze.

"You know that I can see your memories."

It was a statement, not a question, for he had invaded Calista's young mind with such force that he knew he had left his imprint there, and she would know.

She didn't speak, but retreated further towards the other side of the bed.

"You knew when your mother looked into your eyes, she was trying to see your thoughts."

Again, Calista simply retreated, and now she was in danger of falling off the bed from the other edge.

"You have a secret," he said smoothly.

Again, it was not a question. Calista's eyes flickered, and she bit down hard on her lower lip in an attempt to regain control of her features. It worked, for her face flickered only a moment before becoming impassive again.

"Stop that, you are making yourself bleed," he remarked offhandedly, before continuing where he had left off, "I know what you have been trying to hide, so there is no use pretending you don't understand me. I know you are not simple, I know you could open your mouth and answer me right now if you decided to."

Calista pressed her lips into a thin line, and he could read her expression clear as day; she was full of dread, certain that all of her worst fears had come to pass.

"You are afraid of anyone finding out that you are a Squib," he stated, his words clipped, matter-of-fact.

Terror filled the young girl's eyes, and he could see her warring with herself, trying to maintain control of her expression, and he saw her lose the battle. She pulled all her muscles in as tightly as she could, curling herself into a little ball at the farthest part of the bed.

He was silent while he watched her struggle, inwardly willing her to fight against her instincts, to school her face blank again. He wanted to see how far she had developed her potential for Occlumency, before he continued speaking.

"You have tried hard to perform simple bits of magic. You've attempted to use your mother's wand when she was absent. You have realised that you cannot cast any spells. You took interest in my red book because it described those of non-magical blood proceeding in the magical art of potion-making."

All during his short speech, the life slowly drained from Calista's face; her skin turned grey, her eyes were huge orbs of terror and bitterness in her thin face. Still, Severus pressed on, silently willing her to guard herself better from his attacks.

"Your mother would have killed you if she knew. You disgraced her enough as it was. Perhaps you wished to fulfill her wishes and grow up to serve the Dark Lord after all, but you knew you couldn't do it, and you were terrified of the consequences should she find out that you were no better than the Muggles she tortured before your eyes."

Ah. His overt baiting of her finally seemed to have struck the right chords. Calista's face became stony, her eyes glittering maliciously, coldly back at him. He continued.

"You knew that if I learned your secret, I would cast you off, and you would be alone."

Her face hardened and she suddenly looked older than her six years. He could see a different emotion pushing the terror aside, the icy rage that he had rarely glimpsed before in her. In her dark eyes there was a hatred born out of the necessity for it, a steely heart of ice that she had been cultivating all her short life so that when everything fell apart she would have something, anything to fall back on.

"You are surprised that you have come this far without your secret being discovered. You have lived each day in fear of exposure, schooling your expression and your thoughts to keep everyone at bay. Somehow, you've always been just good enough at hiding the contents of your mind to keep you safe."

The small girl's eyes flickered madly, and though he caught a great sense of turmoil, she did not let any of her wild emotions show for long enough to interpret them. At last, she took in a deep breath, held it.

A sort of haze covered her eyes, a translucent barrier over her thoughts that he could easily have pushed aside if he wanted to, but that many others might not have even noticed as a barrier.

Many would look at this child right now and think that her eyes were blank, dead. He could see the furious battle waging just beyond the shadows in her expression, but he knew he was one of the only ones. She clenched her jaw tight, but made no further acknowledgements that she had even heard him speak.

Severus smiled very slightly; he guessed correctly that Calista mistook his expression for a smirk of mockery, and he watched the anger try to rise to the surface of her mind, watched her push it back down mercilessly, with a fierce determination.

At last, Severus felt that Calista had earned the truth. She had put up an admirable display, and he knew he had pushed her harder than he ought have, but it was essential that she learn to protect her mind from outsiders, that she learned to control her vibrant, wild emotions as early as she possibly could.

"I have a secret, too, Calista."

He kept his voice carefully neutral, but could not stop a slight note of tenderness from creeping into it when he spoke her name. Calista stared back at him impassively. Severus smiled softly, and looked her in the eye.

"See if you can find my secret."

He pushed his knowledge of occlumency and legilimancy to the forefront of his mind, but placed a barrier between his immediate thoughts and the knowledge. He gathered his thoughts about Calista's extraordinary demonstration of early occlumency talent, the skill required to shield her thoughts all those years from Bellatrix, who for all her faults in the field had been trained by Lord Voldemort himself in the practice of seeing into another's mind.

He gathered as well a passage from the very book they had read together, one that made reference to the way young wizards and witches demonstrated their powers in their early childhood. Some of them simply uncovered abilities they hadn't known they possessed, and some of them found themselves drawn towards the kind of magic they needed most in their current predicament.

Severus gathered all of this knowledge together, and pushed it in a sealed bubble of a memory to the space just beyond his initial barrier. There were dozens of levels of barriers in his mind that he knew the child could not hope to pass through, but he had manufactured this first one specifically for her. It was strong, and would seem entirely impenetrable at first glance, but there was a weak spot in it, and if one had the patience and focus that would eventually be necessary to master legilimancy, they would be able to find it.

Severus' specially created barrier would serve a dual purpose; not only would he be able to measure Calista's potential by whether or not she could breach his barrier, and then how she managed to unravel the protective charms around the little package of thoughts he had gathered together, but he would be allowing her into his mind, conveying that he trusted her to be there, and that was something he felt it essential to communicate to her but had no words with which to do so. He felt that he had at last found the perfect way to communicate with his daughter.

When Calista did not immediately respond, Severus goaded her again.

"I have seen all of your secrets. Surely you wish to see one of mine?"

She took the bait. Suddenly, he felt a curious, childish presence brushing against the exterior barrier he had created specifically for the purpose of testing Calista. The phantom touch retreated and then returned, and he was able to sense a complexity to the presence that was not childlike at all. The would-be intruder was examining the barrier, calculating all the risks in trying to pass through it.

After a moment, the presence seemed to realise that simply breaking through the walls he had erected was much too difficult a feat for it, for it retreated. He was disappointed when he could feel nothing else from Calista for several moments, and then he dimly became aware of a whisper of a probe here, there, along each part of his virtual barrier.

She was testing for weaknesses. She found a spot that seemed somehow thinner than the rest of the barrier, and then he felt her _push_ with all of her strength. It was a rush of her, all at once, and while she pushed feverishly against the barrier guarding his mind, he was able to push back, and he delved into her own mind – not far. Just enough to warn her that she was exposing herself by throwing herself so fully into her attempted breach. She retreated again and he waited.

After a pause, he felt her tentatively approaching his mind again, feeling once more for weaknesses along the wall. He had deliberately planted the weakness in such a way that she would have to think to find it, and he waited patiently while she discovered that none of the surfaces of his mental barrier were weak enough for her to penetrate. She would have to find another way, for brute force would not get her through.

Because she was inexperienced, Severus was able to gauge exactly what approaches she was taking, for she had not yet learned to guard herself against detection when she tried to invade his thoughts, but he let her continue, curious to see how she would solve this conundrum.

Severus was able to tell exactly when the realisation that she could not force her way through hit her, and he eavesdropped with interest as her mind raced to find another way through. He had carefully set this test up so that, if what he surmised of her intelligence and potential was accurate, she would be able to get through, but the test would prove a real challenge to her.

So far the latter part of his plan was working, but she had not yet found a way to pass the test.

Severus grew slightly impatient as the searching tendrils of Calista's mind prodded the same points in the barrier repeatedly. Because she could not guard her attempted intrusion yet, he knew that she was carefully searching the barrier section by section, and she was approaching it entirely wrong. He felt her pull away again, and then, _finally_.

He sensed her examining the mental barrier as a whole again, instead of in parts. The barrier was like a chain-link fence, constructed with threads of interrelated thoughts running through the links so that she could not see through it. She plucked tentatively at the first set of strings that ran through the fence. These were useless, tedious thoughts, lists of ingredients for simple potions and trivia from various titles on his bookshelf. She would find nothing useful here.

She tried the next group of strings, and pulled away immediately, startled. This group of threads was thick and thorny; it carried the surface bitterness that he often used as a shield around himself.

After a while, Severus thought he had scared Calista away with the darkness of these fence-threads, but then he felt her again, pulling on another link in the chain.

When her mind brushed the secret to opening the barrier, he felt a small thrill; perhaps he had not overestimated her abilities. Perhaps she really could pass his test. She passed over this set of threads, tested a few more, and then returned to it again.

It was an intricately woven braid that when pushed against acted as a force field, keeping her away from whatever lay behind it. However, Calista discovered that when she _pulled_ instead of _pushed_ at the barrier, that it loosened from the rest of the fence. The only way to remove these sturdy threads from the fence was to pull them into herself, which she did.

Once the set of threads was entirely within her mind, they exploded with a shock that sent her away from his mind in a jolt. The threads formed words that echoed in the child's mind:

_Never pull anything into your own mind unless you are certain of its nature._

The warning he had woven into that particular set of threads exposed itself to her, and he waited until she came back, now peering cautiously through the holes in the fence left behind after she had removed the thick braid of thought from it. She rushed towards the barrier, and Severus pushed back at her, pushing more words into her mind.

_The mind is full of traps. When you throw all of your strength against them, they can destroy you in one blow._

There was another pause as she considered this information, and then a tendril of her thoughts snaked into the largest of the newly created holes in his barrier, before the rest of her probing thoughts slipped through.

She had passed the first part. She had breached the barrier, albeit with some help.

He felt her light upon the bubble of knowledge he had prepared, and was pleased when she approached it slowly, cautiously, sending only part of herself to investigate it. Immediately, she began searching for threads similar to those in the barrier, but this safeguard was entirely different. It was like a thick, dense fog that she could not penetrate, and so she retreated again for a few moments before returning.

Caught up in the game, Severus gave her another hint.

_Each time you leave and return, you allow another chance for discovery upon your entry. Don't retreat; just stop pushing._

She figured out this puzzle much more quickly than she had figured out the first. Her mind floated motionless before the compacted bubble of thought, and the fog thinned. She tried once to drift through the thinner fog, but was shoved out again as the fog thickened at the first sign of her intrusion. As she became discouraged, he could feel frustration radiating from her, and goaded her.

_You are so close. Don't you want to know my secret, since I know all of yours?_

She pushed fiercely against the fog at this, and he responded with a wave of force that sent her back outside of his initial barrier. He was insistent that she do this the right way.

He waited, and finally she slipped inside the now-gaping fence again, and focused on the bubble of fog. She studied it carefully, and he felt her mind buzzing with the effort of trying to decode this part of the puzzle. She was so close, he would be disappointed if she could not pass this one final portion of the test he had set…

And then, he felt a tiny ­_poke_ at one spot on the bubble. The fog thickened again where she touched, and he felt another _poke_in a different location. Fog moved from its even distribution to respond to these touchpoints, and she kept sticking tiny tendrils of herself against the bubble on one side, until the other side of the bubble was clear. She pushed herself through, and reached the information he had saved there for her.

Severus paid careful attention as Calista sorted through the knowledge he had hidden inside the mind-bubble. He felt her surprise as she deciphered the implication that she could be a witch after all, that she might be expressing her powers through occlumency, that this guarding of one's thoughts was not something that everyone automatically knew how to do, but a refined magical art.

Finally, after she sorted through the information and was trying to process it, Severus ended the game and pushed her, firmly but gently, out of his thoughts.

Looking into his daughter's eyes as she was forced out of his mind, he spoke to her quietly.

"What you needed more than anything else was a place to hide, and so you created one, inside your mind. This is the way that your powers manifested themselves; just the way you needed them to."

Her eyes widened, and instead of focusing on them, he took in her countenance all at once; the slightly overlarge nose, the patrician cheekbones that would undoubtedly cause her to resemble Bellatrix as she grew older, the thin lips that would not smile. He stretched his own mouth into a small smile, and leaned close to her, whispering softly:

"Calista, my child. You _are_ a witch."


	7. Chapter Six

**Always In Your Shadow**

Chapter Six:

Severus had not discussed Calista much with anyone. He had told the few that needed to know that she was his daughter, and he had asked Albus if she could live with him in his professor's apartments, but aside from that he had seen no reason to discuss Calista with anyone.

As far as he was concerned, on the off-chance that Bellatrix ever escaped Azkaban, there was no reason to send out bulletins advertising his adoption of their daughter.

However, the day after he had seen Calista's memories, he was in the Headmaster's office, stubbornly remaining on his feet when Albus offered him a chair.

"I assume you're not here for tea," Albus said jauntily, "But would you take a cup anyway?"

Severus shook his head and cut straight to the chase.

"I want you to help me modify Calista's memory," he said shortly, his black eyes flashing.

Albus looked at Severus over the rim of his teacup, the trademark half-moon glasses perched at the tip of his nose.

"Normally, Severus, I do not ask you to explain your motives behind your actions, but I'm afraid on this topic I must insist, since you know as well as I do that modifying one's memory is not something to be discussed lightly."

The Headmaster took a dainty sip of tea, holding his teacup with his pinky finger extended, and it looked as though he were discussing the weather or some other trivial matter.

Severus pressed his lips together a moment before replying. He really didn't want to discuss the contents of his daughter's mind with Albus Dumbledore, or with anyone for that matter, but he knew the Headmaster would want a reply.

Finally, he said, "She's seen too much of Bellatrix at her worst." The name escaped his lips with a snarl. "I don't want her to carry that around forever."

Albus nodded, setting his teacup down on the surface of his desk. He steepled his hands in front of him, and closed his eyes for several moments. If he hadn't known the Headmaster better, Severus might have thought that he had fallen asleep, but he did know better, and so he simply waited for a response from the old man.

"Wouldn't you agree with me, Severus, that sometimes it is the things that one triumphs over that make that someone who they are?" The Headmaster's eyes were still closed.

Severus made no sound, but tightened his jaw. Albus opened his eyes and his bright blue eyes met Severus' gaze, piercing him.

"You, of all people, should understand that one cannot simply take away the memory of something unpleasant. Even if one can't remember why they feel sad, or angry, they will still feel that way. I daresay it might be worse to feel the aftermath of a trauma and not know why you feel that way, than to come to terms with what happened and move on."

"You're goading me," Severus said sharply, "You are comparing what you know of myself to Calista. It's not the same thing."

"No, perhaps not," the older man said, folding his hands on his desk, "But I wouldn't be surprised were it a remarkably similar thing."

"She was tortured with Unforgivable Curses, Albus. That's not the sort of thing one 'comes to terms with'!" Severus spat out angrily.

Albus Dumbledore's gaze remained steady and his manner frustratingly calm as he looked at the younger man.

"Isn't it?" he asked simply, not breaking eye contact with Severus. Severus clenched his jaw tighter, and Albus stood up before Severus could reply.

"Well," Albus said, "Think on my words. What would you have been like had you not experienced certain painful events in your life? Are you truly willing to risk the chance that modifying your child's memory might forever change who she is? In the end, it is your decision and, most certainly, Calista's, but I'm afraid I cannot offer my assistance."

The Headmaster smiled, walking around his desk to the door. "Do take care, Severus. I trust your classes will go well today."

With that, Albus Dumbledore excused himself from the office, and Snape was left staring furiously at an empty desk. He turned on his heel and exited the office, his expression dark. On the way back to the dungeons, he deducted ten points from Hufflepuff because of two first-year girls who were gossiping in high, screechy voices.

**o-o-o-o-o**

"Calista."

Severus had instructed her to sit at the small dining table, and now he sat across from her, a mug of coffee between his hands. Across from him, Calista sat, her lank hair falling forward to partially obscure her face. Her concentration was focused on her own mug of coffee.

"Look up at me," Severus instructed, and Calista lowered her head further in response.

"I'm not going to read your thoughts -- I promise you. But there is something we must discuss."

She looked up, not meeting his eyes quite yet.

"I'm assuming you understand that a discussion requires input from multiple parties," he said wryly, "I am going to need some cooperation from you."

He could read the expression on Calista's face from across the castle if he had to. It was the same one he had worn so often in his youth – a sort of defiant sneer, and because he knew the expression he also knew what lay behind it. She was uncomfortable and was using disdain as a cover. He had done it himself a million times.

A child that had been bullied into obeying would rebel eventually by doing exactly the opposite of what was wanted of them. He sighed when he saw the expression on Calista's face, because he knew that this wouldn't be easy. However, Severus had invented the game, and he certainly knew how to play it better than a novice.

"Your face might get stuck that way," he said as he readied himself to have the most one-sided argument he expected he'd ever have in his life. "Mine did, when I was your age."

The comment was so unlike him, and so unexpected that he saw her fierce façade slip for a moment. She bit the inside of her cheek, and he saw the corners of her mouth twitch slightly. It was the closest thing to a smile he could remember seeing on the little girl's determined face.

In a second, her stony, sneering expression was back.

"I have the feeling you're going to refuse my first request, but I will make it anyway so you cannot say that I didn't try to ask nicely. I know full well that you can speak, and that you will when it suits you. In fact, I know that you have an _awful_ lot to say, so please. Start saying it."

She rolled her eyes and set her face. This was rather what he had expected, truth be told. He had breached her defenses and seen her innermost secrets. Of course she was resentful.

"I have something to discuss that may be of great interest to you, but I won't speak of it until we have a proper conversation. I can't make this decision without real input from you. Scowling at me doesn't qualify as input," he continued smoothly, as she had done exactly that.

"I know what I know, and you might as well simply get used to it,"

Severus maintained an air of calm authority, but inside he was figuratively cursing himself for having absolutely no idea to talk to children. His students were one thing, because he didn't like any of them, but this was another thing entirely.

"I am your father," he paused, noticing how foreign the words sounded even to his own ears. By the way Calista's lip curled, it was new for her, too.

"Like it or not, from this point forward I am going to know an awful lot about you. This will be easier if you start speaking to me. Then maybe I won't have to resort to certain methods."

Calista stared back at him stonily. There was a glint in her eye and a set to her little jaw that told him she was not going to make this easy at all. Merlin, had he been this much of a pain when he was young? He was possibly the first person in her life that wanted what was best for her, and she was fighting him tooth and nail all the way.

"I dislike speaking to myself."

His words were clipped, and he allowed the same tone he used with his students to creep into his voice.

Calista glanced towards the doorway, and Severus glared at her much the same way he would have glared at a student trying to leave his class early for anything short of third-degree burns.

"I wouldn't." he advised, and she remained where she was.

In the face of his glare, she looked down into her coffee mug again, although by now it was empty. Severus took another sip of his own coffee. It tasted terrible. He had brewed it weaker than usual so he could feel slightly better about letting his six year old drink coffee. Still, there was time to set rules down once she was speaking to him, and perhaps after her memory was modified.

Severus set his mug down and simply stared across the table at Calista until she finally raised her head again. This time she held his gaze, and the two stared silently at one another.

"We can do this all day," Severus murmured, and catching her expression added, "All night as well, if need be."

Calista seemed to consider this, and he could see her weighing her options in her mind.

"What harm could possibly come of speaking to me?" he asked curtly, "I can learn anything I want from you whether or not you say it. If you'd prefer that I continue to glean information from you the way I have been, that can certainly be arranged—"

Calista opened her mouth and cut him off. Her voice sounded a little hoarse, but not nearly as disused as one might think. He had been right in his assumptions that Calista did sometimes speak, just not in his presence.

"What do you want me to say."

The words came out of her in a statement, and sounded as if they had been wrenched out of her against her will. Her expression remained as stony as ever.

"Well, that's a start," he said dryly, "It's not difficult after all, is it?"

Calista stared at him for a minute, and then her bravado crumbled. He saw her eyes glisten a little with tears that never formed. She bit her bottom lip hard to ensure as much, and then spoke again, hesitantly.

He found he liked her voice a lot more when she wasn't being sullen. She suddenly sounded much more like the child she was.

"I don't like to talk much," she said, and when her features weren't set blankly or in a scowl, he was reminded of how young she really was.

When she hadn't been speaking and had worn such a careful mask, he had almost forgotten how young six-year-olds still are.

"It only gets me into trouble. And no one usually cares about what I say, anyway."

Severus kept his gaze level with hers. "I think I have made it very clear that I am interested in what you have to say."

Calista shrugged and pushed a hank of her messy dark hair back, hooking it behind her ear. She didn't say anything else, and neither did he. Finally, Calista looked up, a question in her eyes.

"Why are you being nice to me, anyway?" Her tone was slightly suspicious, and he lifted his eyebrows in response.

"Because you are my daughter," he said, struggling with the right way to handle this situation. He knew there was probably some set of things he should say to a girl in her situation, but he had no idea what, and so he improvised.

Calista sneered again, and it struck him that she really did resemble him in mannerisms, perhaps a little too much for her own good.

"Yeah, that means a lot," she said bitterly, and he was reminded of the way she had yelled at Bellatrix: _"I don't want to impress your Dark Lord!"_.

"It means more to some than others," he said, "To your mother it meant nothing. To mine, it meant very little. However, in this particular instance, where you and I are concerned…"

He leaned forward, and caught her eye to make sure she was really listening to him.

"It means a lot."

He leaned back in his chair again, pushing his coffee mug away from him as he did so. It still had a little bit of lukewarm brew in it, but he couldn't stand the stuff. It was so damn watery.

"Anyway, Calista, I might ask you the same question, really. You wanted nothing to do with me when you first came here, and now here we sit, having this conversation."

Calista considered this, and he saw that she had a certain way of wrinkling up the bridge of her nose when she was thinking. He supposed he would have found it cute if he cared about such things, but he didn't. He didn't.

"Well," Calista said, carefully. "At first I thought you would be just like everyone else. I thought you wouldn't like me. No one really likes me," she said, and he thought she sounded very lonely.

"Not many people like me, either," he admitted to her, and she wrinkled her nose again, her expression questioning.

"But why? You're nice."

Severus couldn't suppress a smirk at that. "You'll find your opinion isn't shared."

"Why don't people like _you_?" Calista persisted, "They don't like me because they think I'm stupid and weird-looking. And because I can't.. or at least, I thought I couldn't… do magic."

Severus noted that she had a constant quaver in her voice, as though speaking made her nervous, but he also noted the effort she put into minimising that effect.

"No," Severus said, "They don't like you, or me, for the same reasons. Because we're smarter than they are, and because no matter what anyone says to us or tries to make us believe we'd still prefer to think for ourselves."

Calista opened her mouth, and Severus interrupted her before she could speak.

"I know you weren't opening your mouth to protest your intelligence, because that would be unduly humble as well as ridiculous."

There was a finality in his words, and he saw it register.

"Since that isn't what you were about to say, what _was_ it?"

Calista pressed her lips together, and then said, "What was the thing you wanted to talk to me about?"

Severus looked at her, took in the hopeful, admiring expression in her eyes. She had seen a lot of pain, and there really was no way to erase it all, but she looked like she was ready to start over, and just waiting for someone to show her how.

There was so much half-hidden in her dark eyes, so like his own, but her admiration for him was abundantly clear. They were a lot alike, and Severus knew that some of the best parts of himself, as well as many of the worst parts, had been born out of the horrific things he had seen and done in his life.

"I wanted to ask you if you'd like to start learning to make potions," he said, closing his expression off.

Calista slowly smiled, an expression that couldn't, and probably never would, reach her eyes.

"Really?"

"Really." Severus didn't return her smile.

He told himself that he hadn't said anything about the possibility of relieving her of some of her more painful memories because he had considered Dumbledore's words, and wanted to give his daughter the same opportunity he had had to take the ruins of a life and choose to finally rise from the ashes and build something of it.

He told himself this quite firmly, but there was a tiny part of him that couldn't help but wonder if his decision had been in any way affected by the way she had looked at him.

No one had looked at him with such open adoration and trust since he had been scarcely older than Calista herself now was.


	8. Chapter Seven

**Always In Your Shadow**

Chapter Seven:

When Severus first began teaching Calista about potions, she seemed a promising student. She could read the entire ingredients list and find all of the ingredients in his stores, and she did her best to follow the instructions to the letter.

However, there were some words in the potions books he was using that didn't seem to be in Calista's vocabulary. When instructed to mince, granulate, or otherwise modify the ingredients, she often seemed at a loss as to what exactly she was supposed to do with them, and there were a few times where he had stopped her just in time from ignoring the words she didn't understand and simply dumping the ingredients in as they were.

"There's a reason for every single word in a potion recipe," he had to explain more than once. "No matter how small the detail, it must be followed properly or the entire thing stands to be ruined."

Just as Severus couldn't keep a small note of annoyance out of his voice after the first time he had given an instruction, Calista could not control _her_ annoyance at being corrected. She still didn't say much, but her eyes would flash and she would follow his instructions with exaggeratedly slow and careful movements.

During one of these instances, when Severus corrected a mistake she had made in measuring, she snapped at him.

"I'm not _daft_," she said, her face twisting into a childlike scowl.

Severus raised his eyebrows and met her gaze with his own.

"If I thought you were daft, I wouldn't bother spending so much time correcting you," he responded, his tone admittedly exasperated. "However, I do think you'd catch on a lot faster if you would stop making such an effort to ignore everything I say."

Calista's scowl only deepened, and she dumped the handful of beetles' eyes she was holding, which was twice the amount the brew called for and the initial source of this particular argument, into the cauldron, already turning to stride from the room.

Severus, knowing full well what would happen if too many beetles' eyes were used, drew his wand from the depths of his robe, and sent a freezing spell to engulf the cauldron and the flame beneath it.

"Wait. A. Minute," he spat out, looking over his shoulder at his daughter, who stopped walking but didn't turn towards him. He quickly removed the cauldron from the flame before turning to face Calista's back.

"Come here, Calista."

He was unable to keep a mild amount of displeasure out of his words, and Calista whirled around, and marched defiantly towards him.

Severus thought with an inward snarl that this was the only child he had yet met that could be obedient and defiant at the same time. He was quite certain (wrongly so) that he had never been this difficult as a child.

"As I was saying before you so elegantly replied," he said, looking down at her sternly, "There is a reason why that particular potion calls for a specific measurement of all the ingredients. You are not daft, which is why I'm astounded that you chose to do such a daft thing."

He could see Calista's eyes clouding with anger, and he held up a hand to silence her.

"Please do not interrupt me. Beetles' eyes are typically fairly inert, but when coupled with fire salamander scales, which you had already added to the draught, they become quite explosive. You could have blown that cauldron up in your face."

Calista scowled at him again, and clenched her jaw tightly; she still resorted to silence when she was most frustrated, and her silence frustrated Severus. He waited a few more moments as the silence stretched before them, before coming to a decision.

"Fine. If you won't listen to me when I try to instruct you, then I won't waste my time until you have a better idea what you are working with. There will be no more potions lessons until you have thoroughly researched the two hundred most commonly used ingredients. I want you to write a brief description of each one, including alternate names, appearance, identifying traits, look-alikes, main uses, and, most importantly, interactions with other commonly used ingredients."

As he was speaking, Calista's childish glare was slowly replaced with a blank, expressionless mask. He wasn't even certain that she had done it on purpose, since she was still young enough for her power to act without her conscious consent. Still, Severus was exhausted and exasperated, having spent months trying to forge a connection with his daughter.

"I'd very much like to know _what_ it is you have against me, child. I have done everything in my power to make you as happy as I can. All I ask in return is that you respect me as your… elder."

He had been about to say 'father', but when the image of his own brutish, negligent father came to mind, he could not equate himself with that.

Calista closed her eyes and opened her mouth. "I didn't ask you for anything,"

Severus blinked, looking at the tiny figure that stood defiantly facing him, even though she scarcely came to his waist. Of all the responses he expected from the child, this wasn't one of them.

"What?" was the first response he had, and out it came.

"I didn't ask you for anything," Calista repeated, opening her eyes, but keeping them trained on the floor, "Why should I have to do what you say?"

"Because I'm never going to tell you to torture someone or praise the Dark Lord. Perhaps you forget that _I _am not the one who put you through the miseries that you have regrettably gone through."

As soon as the words left his mouth, Severus knew it would have been wise to keep his outburst to himself. It wasn't really Calista he was angry with, but Bellatrix. She had turned this child cold, unapproachable, and he had no idea how to reverse any of it.

He saw a flicker of hurt pass over Calista's expression, and then the icy rage he had seen her capable of fought its way to the surface. She glared at him as she hissed her reply:

"Well, you didn't do anything to stop it."

She turned away from him, and he made to reach for her, but she moved quickly. Severus cursed, and sent several vials crashing to the floor from the nearby table with a great sweep of his arm.

He didn't even bother chasing after the girl. He knew that she could hide herself well when she wanted to, and he still didn't know what he could say to counteract what either of them had said. He knew that her words were true, but he also saw a larger picture she couldn't possibly understand at her age.

Bellatrix had been with more than one person he personally knew; there could have been any number of people who fathered the child, and she wouldn't say, wouldn't let anyone see her. Still, that wasn't the thing that had prevented him from acting.

True, he had known that Bellatrix was cruel and twisted, but he had not fully realised to what extent. He had not envisioned such a horrific childhood for the unknown infant, and perhaps it would have prompted him to act – but either way, he knew he would have placed both himself and the child at risk.

No one crossed Bellatrix Lestrange, Lord Voldemort's personal pet, and maintained the Dark Lord's trust. It had been _essential_ that Severus remain in a trusted position at Voldemort's right hand in order to protect Lily.

_It didn't work out that way, though, did it?_

A nasty voice hissed in his mind, and he blasted a few jars off his shelves with his wand. What he was left with, in the end, was the excruciating knowledge that he had failed both of the people who meant more than anything to him.

Severus writhed inwardly with self-loathing and disgust. He had not deserved to keep Lily, and he had lost her to that arrogant prick, Potter, and ultimately lost her forever, even the memory of her stained with her blood.

Now his own daughter, who scarce weeks ago had looked at him with admiration, stood at risk to be lost to him, if he could not find a way to make things right.

Severus flew down the corridors of Hogwarts like an oversized, agitated bat, and knocked impatiently on the Headmaster's door. As soon as it opened, Severus locked his black eyes on the pair of intense blue ones that looked at him questioningly.

"I don't care about your personal qualms on the matter. I need you to help me modify Calista's memory."

* * *

**Note:** Someone made a comment referring to Severus' living quarters at Hogwarts, and I just want to clarify what they are like for the purpose of this fic, since it's been hard to tell from some of my descriptions. I'm envisioning an office off of his main classroom, and from that office there is a hallway that leads to his apartments, which consist of four rooms: a small sitting room that Severus actually uses as a library, a room with a small table and a hearth (kitchen, basically), and two bedrooms. There's another door in the hallway that leads to his apartment, which covers a stairway that leads into a big, dank, dungeony room where he does a lot of his potion-making and keeps the more lethal and rare of his ingredients. I hope that clears it up.


	9. Chapter Eight

**Always In Your Shadow**

Chapter Eight

Albus refused Severus' repeated request for assistance in modifying Calista's memory, but Severus did not want to take no for an answer, and so he continued to push the older man. Finally, Albus held one hand up, looking over his spectacles at the angry young man refusing to leave his office.

"Severus. I cannot even give consideration to this request unless it is made by Calista herself."

Severus straightened his posture and met the headmaster's gaze. "If Calista asks you, you'll agree?" he asked, attempting to confirm what he had heard.

"If Calista asks me, I will consider the request. However, I will not perform any modifications to her memory if she cannot demonstrate a complete understanding of all the implications of the process. I imagine it will be a great many years before she has that kind of grasp on the enormity of this proposal."

Severus was no longer paying attention as he left the office.

**o-o-o-o-o**

It was a few days before Severus and Calista were speaking again at all, and they made no reference to their argument. After his classes ended on the day they resumed speaking to each other, he sat Calista in his office to speak to her about what he had discussed with Albus. It quickly became evident that Albus was right; Calista did not grasp the full extent of the proposal.

"So… you can do magic on me, and all of the bad things will just be gone?"

Severus looked at her gravely. Ironically, even though he wanted to alter her memory, he would not lie baldly to her.

"No," he said, "That isn't how it works. You might still feel sad because of things that happened. You just wouldn't be able to remember the details. You would know that Bellatrix had done something horrible, but you wouldn't be plagued with images and sounds from whatever she had done."

"If I didn't have to remember the bad things, I wouldn't get sad," she said, simplistically, and Severus shook his head.

"Taking away the _memories_ of the events doesn't take away the events, Calista. No matter what you remember about it, you will always have those scars on your back, and you may still have nightmares about some of the things you won't be able to recall."

Calista looked at him solemnly, and bit her bottom lip. Severus couldn't tell without using legilimancy what she thought of the suggestion. Finally, she relaxed her jaw and let out a breath.

"Well," she said slowly, "It's still a good thing, isn't it? To forget?"

"It… can be," he said quietly, standing. "I want you to think very hard about this before you decide. It is not as simple as you seem to think it will be."

"I already decided," Calista said stubbornly, "I want you to do it. I don't want to remember anything about _her_."

Severus sighed, knowing he would have to explain it to her in more detail, to try and make her understand, but he didn't have the energy or the patience at the moment.

**o-o-o-o-o**

Severus pushed open the door to Calista's small room and stepped inside, having prepared a better explanation of memory modification that he hoped the child would understand. She wasn't in the room, and Severus was turning to leave when he noticed something on top of the wooden chest of drawers her clothes were kept in.

It was a book, one he had never seen before. He picked it up and studied the cover, flipping a few pages. It appeared to be some sort of journal, and he was surprised he had never seen it before. Calista had brought with her precious few possessions, and he had thought he'd seen them all.

He opened the cover and was immediately confronted by page after page of childish scrawl. It appeared at first to be nothing but meaningless scribbles, but as he flipped the pages he came to one that had legible writing on it. The letters were loose and crooked, clearly drawn by a small child's hand. He had to squint at it before he realized it said "I hat her".

Severus could only assume that Calista had written this about Bellatrix before she had learned about silent e's. Intrigued, he flipped a few more pages, and came across another page with writing.

There were some random scribbles on the top half of the page, but the bottom half contained a short paragraph written in a messy, childish scrawl that showed a much better degree of hand-eye coordination and a better grasp of the English language. She must have written this part when she was older.

_A lot of books have peepel in them and wen they grow up they get to do lots of things that I like I do not want to staye with mum and hurt peepel I want to be like peepel in books and do lots of things but not bad things except may be to mum_

Severus couldn't help the tiny smirk that quirked the corners of his mouth at the spelling and grammar mistakes on the page. She had learned a bit about silent letters, he mused, but punctuation was still out of her grasp at the time it was written. He looked all over the page, but there was no date.

Flipping the rest of the pages, he saw that almost the entire book was filled with scribbles or writing. There were only a few blank pages nestled amongst pages and pages of her writing, and none of the pages seemed to go in order. Several of them were torn and wrinkled, and Severus surmised that Calista had been writing in this book for as long as she could hold a pencil. The pages weren't in order because infants rarely bothered to scribble in order, and a few pages looked like she might even have tried to eat them when she was very young.

Severus tucked the book under his arm and took it with him to his own room, where he lit the lone candle against the wall. He sat down in a soft, old-looking chair next to his bed, and started at the beginning of the book, losing himself in the pages and pages of his daughter's words.

**o-o-o-o**

Severus had not hidden from Calista the fact that he had read her journal, and even though he knew she was aware of the intrusion, she didn't say anything in regards to it, at least not at first. Severus was certainly not above intruding on Calista's privacy for a number of reasons.

Firstly, she kept much to herself and he needed to understand what she was dealing with, but there was more than that. He hungered for knowledge of her, because the more time he spent with her, the more he felt the loss of her first six years. Reading her journal, Severus had realised how much of a person develops when they are very young, and he realised that he had already missed the opportunity to influence much of her development.

He had not understood before he had read her book, cover to cover apart from the meaningless scribbles and a few illegible passages, that she wasn't merely a child waiting to grow into a person. She already _was_ a person. He had known that Calista hadn't understood the levity of their earlier conversation, but there was something else in his mind now.

Erasing Calista's memories, painful as they were, would take away part of who she was. He could not take the bad things away without erasing part of herself. She didn't understand that any better than he had only hours before, and Severus finally understood why Albus had cautioned against modifying her memory. There was so much more to lose than he had thought.

The bald fact of the matter was that Severus loved Calista. He truly cared for her, and he wanted to make sure, as any parent does, that she would not be so vilely mistreated again, He could not change what had happened to her, and he could not erase his own absence during the first part of her life, but he could swear to be there for her from this point forward, and he could protect her from future harm.

When she had taken a milder sleeping draught (he was again attempting to wean her off of the powerful Night Blossom draught) and nearly fell asleep in his arms, Severus carried her to her bed and pulled the blankets over her.

He lingered a moment before he left, simply watching her sleep. Silently, he reached into his robes where he still carried her journal in an oversized pocket, and set it softly on top of her bureau, where he had found it. He made quietly for the door, but at the last minute, stopped and turned around.

Severus walked over to Calista's bedside and leaned over the sleeping child. Gently, he brushed a strand of black hair away from her pasty cheek, and kissed her lightly on the forehead. He thought he saw a smile flit across her sleeping features, briefly turning up the corners of her mouth, but it was gone again as soon he had identified it.

Severus pushed her tangled hair away from her face. He would not have recognized the expression on his own face. He wore a thin-lipped smile that could almost be called tender, and his eyes were shiny with something that wasn't malice.

The moment passed, and Severus slipped from the room, easing the door closed behind him.


	10. CALISTA'S JOURNAL

**Always In Your Shadow**

**Note:** This section isn't absolutely vital to the story, although it really helps establish Calista's character beyond her trauma. However, it isn't necessary to read it if you'd prefer to stick to the traditional chapter layout of the story and skip this one.

Calista's Journal

_I do not wont to cry but on my bak it herts verry mush I hat her she is not my mum_

_To day I thot mum new the bad thing she was cross with me but she was not cross for the bad thing she does not no wat it is_

_

* * *

  
_

_A lot of books have peepel in them and wen they grow up they get to do lots of things that I like I do not want to staye with mum and hurt peepel I want to be like peepel in books and do lots of things but not bad things except may be to mum_

_There is a cat at the howse. All the peepel want to hurt mum and the dark lord. I do not like most of the peepul but I do not think I wood like the dark lord too. The cat is yellow and soft but he is not mine. Sumtimes the cat lets me pet him. I want to have a cat that is mine._

_

* * *

  
_

_The only one I like here is Lily. I wish she was my mum but she is having her own baby soon and then she would not want me anyway. She is pretty. If she was my mum I would be pretty too. My mum is mad. I hope that does not mean I will be mad when I am bigger. I like Remus too I guess. He reads books to me. Some of his books are for babies but it is fine. He has a nice voice. He sounds safe. Lily and Remus are the only ones I like. Sirius keeps saying he is my uncle but he said mum is his cousin it does not make sense. I do not like Sirius even if he took me from mum. He calls me stupid and he thinks I do not hear him. Most of the people in this house think I never hear them._

_Remus and Sirius are talking about me. They want to know who is my father. Remus said I remind him of someone. He does not know who I remind him of. Sirius said whoever is my father has a big nose. Does the dark lord have a big nose?_

_

* * *

  
_

_Today I was out side there was a girl she asked me my favorite colour hers is pink which is light red but I do not think I like pink. I told her I do not have a favorite colour she said every one does so I pick yellow and blue. She said I can only pick one but I do not care I pick two. I like yellow because it looks happy. I like blue because of the sky because I think it would be fun to fly in it._

_I hate all the other girls here. They are mean and daft. I hate Jessica the most. She always does magic even though it is not allowed. She makes coloured sparks all the time and she brags that she will get adopted by someone rich and go to Hogwarts. I do not even want to go to Hogwarts, it must be stupid if they will let Jessica in. The other girls in my room are Amy, Marie, Allison, and Faye but I don't like any of them. They all do whatever Jessica says. I hate her._

_They are not letting me eat dinner today because I hit Jessica. I hate her. She gets to have dinner even though she started it. She always starts it. She was pulling my hair again and she said I had no parents because I was too ugly and they do not want me. She says only girls with yellow hair can be pretty but that is not true. Anyway I do not care. I would rather be clever than pretty. Jessica can not read. I am hungry. I hate Jessica. I hate all the girls here._

_Squib. That is what they call people who can not do magic even if their mum and dad can. I saw the word in a book. The book says Squibs can do a little magic if they try hard. I will try hard. I hate not having magic. If I had magic I would not have cuts on my back. I would have stopped her. I will try very hard. I wish I could have a pet here. If I had a cat it would like me. I could pet it. I do not need all the girls to like me. They are stupid. My cat could talk if I had one. We would make fun of Jessica. And we would not get in trouble. My cat would be magic and his voice comes from in your head. That way Elisa can not hear him make fun of Jessica._

_Elisa says I have to brush my hair. She is stupid. I do not care what my hair looks like. I am ugly anyway. Even if my hair was neat. And I do not care. Being pretty is stupid. Every thing is stupid. I hate this place._

_I had a dream that I was doing magic. There was a man he was helping me do magic. He was nice to me. He said I had magic but I was too sad to use it. He had eyes like mine they were black. I think I dreamed of him before. But I do not know. Maybe I did not. I wish the dream was real._

_Jessica has a cat! She said the cat is named Princess. All the stupid mean girls are in my room. They are playing with the cat and they sound daft. "Ooooohhhh Princess lalalala". I am going to tell Elisa. It is not fair. We can not have pets. Even Jessica._

_Jessica is leaving. She is getting a new mum and dad and she is leaving in two months. I am glad she is going I hate her. Her new mum gave her the cat Elisa says she can keep it. It is not fair. Jessica told the cat to bite me but the cat did not bite me. My mum would never give me a cat. I wish I could have Jessica's new mum. She can have my mum. Then she would not be so daft. You have to be clever near my mum or she wins. I always win because I am clever._

_Faye is stupid too. I hate her too. She said I hate Jessica because I am cross that Jessica has a mum now and I do not. She is so daft. I had a mum and I did not want her. I want to be by myself. I hope all the daft girls get mums. Then I can be by myself. No one will pull my hair and rip the books._

_I had a dream with the man again. The man with black eyes. He came to the house and said he was going to be my dad. It was a weird dream. I must had the dream because of Jessica. I like the other dream when the man shows me magic._

_

* * *

  
_

_The man with black eyes is real. Today he came to the house. He told Elisa that he will be my father. I have never seen the dark lord but mum told me what he looks like. The man with black eyes does not look like mum said. I think he lied to Elisa. Or maybe he thinks I am another girl. All the stupid people here call me Chloe. Chloe is not my name. The man with black eyes must be here for the real Chloe. I wonder if the real Chloe is pretty._

_Mum lied. The dark lord is not my father. I will write more later._

_I live at Hogwarts now. Jessica is still at the stupid orphan house and I am at Hogwarts! I am not here for school. I am here because this is where my father lives. My father is not the dark lord. He is tall. I do not think of him as Dad. He is nice to me. I do not know if I like him._

_I think he is really my father. I wish I knew him before. He reads books a lot like me. I think we look the same a little. I am smaller and I am a girl. He does have a big nose bigger than mine. I do not think he is ugly. I think Jessica and Sirius are more ugly. I like how my father looks. People said always that Mum was very pretty. Mum and Sirius and Jessica are all nasty. I do not think my father looks ugly I think he looks nice not nasty._

_I think he knows. I think he knows the bad thing. He knows I am a Squib now he will hate me. I will go back to the stupid orphan house. At least Jessica does not live there anymore. Maybe he will not let me go back. Maybe he will kill me. He is not nasty but I think he hates stupid people. I hate stupid people too. Squibs are stupid. They can not do magic right. I think he hates me because I am a stupid Squib._

_My father does not hate me. He said I am not a Squib he said I can do magic. He said when I hide it is magic. I do not know if it is true. This is just like my dream. The man with black eyes took me to live with him and now he told me I have magic._

_My father is stupid. He is mean and stupid. He is cross with me. I do not care. I am cross with him too. Why did he take me home now and not before? If he came to get me before then I would not have cuts on my back. I hate the cuts. The cuts make me feel like mum is here. They hurt sometimes for no reason. I hate everybody in the whole world. I want to be by myself. If mum gave me her wand I would take it. I would take it and I would kill everyone and then it could just be me._

_I am not cross anymore. He is not cross anymore. He said there is a way to make all the bad go away. I want to make it go away. I want to be happy like all the daft girls were happy. My father said the way to make it go away is magic. Maybe the magic can make me pretty too. Then I could use magic and make Jessica ugly. And I would tell her she is ugly. I would pull her hair. I hope I can do real magic soon. I would be horrid to all the people who are nasty to me. I would hurt them back._

* * *


	11. Chapter Nine

**Always In Your Shadow**

Chapter Nine:

Breakfast the next morning was hell. Severus had anticipated this and brewed the coffee extra strong. It began when Calista shuffled into the kitchen, her lids half-closed from the lingering effects of the sleeping potion, her hair a tangled mess about her shoulders. She approached the work-top, as if the coffee carafe was magnetic and she made of metal.

"Actually," Severus said in what he hoped was a mild tone, "You really are too young to drink coffee all the time. I've had some pumpkin juice brought down for you instead. Have you ever tried it?"

His attempt at placating the child was weak, and he knew it. More importantly, Calista knew it and she turned to face him, her expression stormy. She shuffled to the table and slumped in the chair, pouting and completely ignoring the glass of cold pumpkin juice in front of her.

"I was afraid it was going to be like this," he said, his voice strained. He realized again that he had absolutely no idea how to deal with young children. There had to be an easier way.

Calista maintained her silent pout. Finally, Severus sighed and set his own coffee mug down. "Fine," he said, realizing that he was only making it harder on himself by having this conversation the same day he tried to cut her caffeine back. "You may have a little coffee. But I will pour it." He rose and filled a second mug a little less than halfway, and then he added cream and sugar to it, before setting it down in front of Calista.

Calista sniffed the mug suspiciously. "What's this?" she asked, her long nose wrinkled.

"Try it. It tastes better that way."

She eyed him dubiously, but took a small sip. Her eyes widened and she took another, longer sip. When she saw him watching her, she put the cup down and hid her reaction. "It's okay," she said, as if it weren't.

Severus bit back a laugh, and then composed himself before leaning forward to address his stubborn daughter.

"Calista, do you remember what we spoke about yesterday? About erasing some of your bad memories?"

She nodded, taking another long sip of the coffee. "I want to do it," she said, setting the mug down again. "Can we do it today?"

Severus looked at her solemnly. "I don't know if you fully understand what I told you about it, Calista," he said, preparing himself for a prickly response. "Modifying your memory is actually a lot more than what it sounds like. Your mind is complex; it is not like a series of photographs where we can simply throw away the ones you don't like. Fragments of those memories might linger; they might cause disturbing dreams. Your emotions would not be affected at all, regardless of whether their associated memories remain intact—,"

He stopped, realising by the glazed look in Calista's eyes that she had no idea what he was talking about. He _really_ did not know how to speak to children.

"Right," he said, "I'm going to explain that a bit differently. Ahm…" he cast around for an explanation the child might understand.

"You've had bad dreams, Calista. When you first wake up you remember them well, correct?"

She nodded.

"What about later on that day? Or the next day? Or at the end of the week? Do you still remember the details of the dream?"

"Not really," she said, wrinkling the bridge of her nose a little as she tried to follow his words.

"If your dream was about a bear chasing you, even if you forgot most of the dream, would you be afraid if you saw a bear?"

Calista stared at him. "Well," she said, uncertainly, "I think I would be afraid if I saw a bear even if I didn't dream about one chasing me. They're really big."

"Fine," Severus said, too frustrated to find her reply humorous, "A dream about…this table chasing you. If you dreamt that this table was chasing you and trying to attack you, would you want to sit at it for breakfast?"

"I guess not," Calista said, still not making the connection. Severus continued.

"Erasing your memories is just like forgetting a dream. Even if you forgot everything about your—about Bellatrix," he caught himself, unwilling to acknowledge Bellatrix's bond with the child he now thought of exclusively as his, "If you saw a picture of her, you would still feel much the same as you feel now when you remember her."

Calista frowned. "Then how do I make the bad things go away?"

Severus rose from his seat and came around the table. He knelt by Calista's chair so he was level with her, and gingerly put his arm around her shoulders. He felt incredibly awkward, and by the way Calista squirmed, she did, too. Neither of them had had much experience with being part of a family. Still, he wanted to learn, for Calista.

Severus looked at the child's small, pale face, seeing a good deal of himself reflected in her eyes. "I wish there was a spell that could do that, Calista." He tightened his arm around her shoulders a little, bringing her closer to him. She still stiffened some whenever he touched her, as if she expected an attack.

"I… I have a lot of bad memories myself. If there was such a spell, I would already have cast it. It is very easy to do horrible things with a wand, but there is no similarly easy way to undo any of those things."

Severus could not help but mask his own eyes as he spoke. He did not want his daughter to know the pain he had experienced. More importantly, he never wanted her to know the horrible things he had done. He paused a moment to be sure Calista understood his words before he continued.

"I should never have suggested what I did. It was the easy way out for both of us, but it would not have helped either of us."

"Then how do I get rid of the bad things?"

Calista's voice was very small, and she sounded vulnerable.

Severus felt a great tear open up somewhere inside himself, and he closed his eyes briefly. He had to do this right. It struck him suddenly how important the next words he uttered would be. Calista was a child, a child that had been badly hurt, and she was depending on him, the adult who had come to rescue her, to make it right. Regardless of Severus' own past, and his feelings of inadequacy when it came to parenting, he was really all that Calista had, and she needed him. He wondered if he could stand the weight of that responsibility, but knew it would be even harder to live without it.

"No one can change things that have already happened," he said, a curious weight to his words. "Those memories will always exist, but we can keep them – the bad things, as you call them – We can keep them in memories only, so that they don't become part of you. Sometimes, you will look at those memories and feel sad, but you won't stay sad if you remember that all of those things have already happened, and can't hurt you anymore."

He didn't know if Calista fully understood what he said, and he felt just as vulnerable as she had sounded when he brought his other arm up to hug her.

Calista slipped off the chair and hid in her father's embrace, hiding her face against his chest. He held on to her as tightly as if they were in the middle of a raging sea, and only the two of them were floating. At that moment, Severus was glad that he could hide his thoughts, because he had not felt anything like this in a very long time. He wondered if Calista knew that he needed her just as much as she needed him.

**o-o-o-o**

Severus doubted that Calista grasped everything he had explained to her about memory modification, but neither of them spoke of it again. After their last conversation about it, Severus had fixed his other recent mistake with Calista.

"I need to tell you that I am very sorry about the way I treated you over that potion. I was never cross with you. I was cross with all of the people who have mistreated you."

Calista hadn't replied, so he tried again to explain. He was quickly learning that parenting involved a lot of explaining.

"I was the one who did something wrong, not you. You are very bright, and I am proud of how much you can do." Severus could hear the note of strain in his voice, but hoped Calista wouldn't notice. He hoped he was saying the right words. "I should never have said what I did, and I am very sorry."

He was not used to apologies any more than he was used to setting rules about caffeine intake, and it would have showed to another child, but Calista knew even less about the dynamics of apologies than he did.

"I'm not cross with you, either," Calista said, "For not coming to find me sooner."

Severus shook his head. "You should be. There is no excuse. If I had known, I never would have let her touch you."

"Well," Calista said, "I'm not angry. I'm just happy that I can live with you now."

Severus smiled at her. "I am, too."

"It's good that I have magic, after all. I wouldn't want to leave."

Severus' expression darkened slightly, and he knelt down to be at her level.

"That is something else I've been meaning to speak to you about," he said, cupping her chin in his hand to ensure that she looked at him.

"It doesn't matter to me whether you are a witch or a Squib or a hippogriff," he said earnestly, "You're still _you_, and you're still – and always will be – my daughter."

Calista giggled, and he thought it was the most wonderful sound he had heard in a long time. Her laugh was awkward and loud and she snorted a little, and Severus adored it.

"If I was a hippogriff I wouldn't fit inside!" she said through her giggles, and at that moment she could have been any child. Severus committed this image of her to memory, knowing that it would forever be one of his dearest ones.

"I guess we would have to live outside, then," he said lightly, hiding the intensity of his emotions behind a cool smile.

"We couldn't live outside," Calista said, snorting with laughter again. "All the books would get wet."

For his part, Severus was at a loss to understand why this discussion had reduced her to a fit of laughter, but he didn't care. He had never seen her look so _alive_.

He looked at her as she laughed, at her strange black eyes and prominent cheekbones, at her pointed chin and tangled hair, at the pasty white of her skin and the awkward length of her nose, and he thought she was the most beautiful child he had ever seen.

* * *


	12. Chapter Ten

**Always In Your Shadow**

Chapter Ten:

Finally, Severus and Calista seemed to have reached a turning point, of sorts. Nothing became instantly better overnight, and both of them were already far too jaded to expect such a thing, but at last ,after more than six months, it seemed that they had come to a wary understanding, a tentative bond of trust.

Severus had taken a new approach in tutoring his daughter since their heated argument. Part of it, he supposed, was that he had been thinking of her as one of his regular students, and not as a much younger child. Although he was not by nature a very patient or understanding man, Severus tried his best to become one in Calista's presence, and in turn, he noticed that Calista was becoming slowly less combative.

He had taken Calista to the Hogwarts Library, ignoring glares from Madame Pince, who would rather host a dragon in her library than a young child. Together, he and Calista had begun to work through _The Potion Crafter's Essential Toolkit_, which had been a gem of a find in the library. It covered most of the commonly used ingredients and techniques he wanted Calista to learn, but it used simpler language and carried a great many illustrations that his books did not.

At first, Severus was admittedly bored by the simplified text, and by the process of going through basic herbs and roots and such several times over, but Calista was slowly coming out of her shell, and he found himself amused and heartened by her growing enthusiasm for the subject.

Calista's birthday was approaching in the spring, and Severus was aware of it as they went through lessons and breakfasts and their slow, tentative bonding. She had not said anything about it, and he wondered if she even knew when her birthday was. Somehow, he didn't think Bellatrix would have remembered to celebrate it.

Because he had a calculated suspicion that this would be the first time Calista had ever really celebrated her birthday, he had a desire to make something special of it. For weeks he wondered what he should do – it wasn't like he had ever really had much of a birthday party from his parents, and, as dearly as Severus cared for his daughter, he wasn't exactly the type to hire entertainment and invite all the other children in the neighborhood.

Calista's birthday was March the fourteenth, and on the thirteenth of March, Severus watched from his desk where Calista was lying on her stomach on the floor of his office, drawing something with blue ink. As it turned out, not all of the scribbles and sketches in Calista's book had been done when she was younger; frequently, he saw her drawing designs on scrap parchment, although he was usually at a loss to describe what her pictures represented. As advanced as Calista might be in other aspects, she had average drawing skills at best, and it was often impossible to tell whether she was drawing a princess or an elephant. Severus had a dozen of these hung around the flat, and would never dare admit that he didn't know what most of them were supposed to be.

As he watched her, he wondered if she would like what he had prepared for her birthday. He thought he had done well, but she was so unpredictable in some ways, just as she was becoming more predictable to him in others. Sometimes he thought he understood something about her, and he turned out to be wrong. Calista far surpassed her age group in verbal and written literacy skills, and so he had wrongly assumed that these skills were a reflection of her general comprehension of the world. While it was true that Calista had keen perception, she had a very limited sphere of experience and he was beginning to see that she didn't know what to make of things that fell outside of that sphere.

Similarly, he had thought at first that her unusual ability for occlumency was reflective of deliberate practice of the skill, when it later became clear that it was a skill she wasn't even fully aware of. At first, her ability to hide her thoughts when she was upset had struck him as uncanny, but lately he was seeing more and more of Calista when she _wasn't_ feeling immediately threatened, and he saw far less evidence of this particular talent. It seemed as if it only became available to her when she felt she was in particular danger, or when her nerves were on edge from some perceived threat.

So, as he watched her draw yet another picture that he could not identify but knew he would mount on the wall with a Sticking Charm anyway, he hoped that what he had planned would be as successful as he had hoped when he had arranged it all.

**o-o-o-o-o**

Severus was sitting at the kitchen table long before he expected Calista to be awake. He had classes to teach until late afternoon, but he had the early morning. With any luck she would wake up early enough that they could have breakfast together first, but she wasn't always waking as early as she had before. Severus was actually glad for this, because it likely meant she was sleeping better, albeit still with the aid of a mild draught.

Small footfalls sounded down the short corridor, and then a knee-high girl wandered blearily into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes with balled fists. Her hair, as usual, was a tangled mass around her shoulders and almost any mother would have been struck by a fierce urge to give her a good washing and grooming, but Severus knew well enough to simply accept, for now, that his daughter was here, and she was healthy. Besides, he wasn't a mother.

"Good morning," Severus said, unable to hide a small smile as a huge yawn snapped her jaw open.

"G'mrrrf," was what he heard, as she shuffled to the table. She really wasn't a morning person at all, now that her morning coffee had been successfully transitioned into pumpkin juice. Severus was willing to concede mornings in light of the fact that she went to bed hours earlier and slept hours later than before.

He waited for her to settle herself at her seat and spread jam on her toast before he addressed her again.

"Do you know what day it is?" he asked her, a strange wistful note of amusement in his voice. He would never have admitted it, even to himself, but he had always wanted to be surprised with something nice on his own birthday, when he was a child. It was a wish that had never been fulfilled.

Calista yawned again, and when her jaw snapped closed she tilted her head. "Er…Tuesday?" she guessed, her mind still slowly rousing itself from a state of repose. She was pulling a day out of thin air.

"Actually, it's Thursday," he said, "But that's not what I meant. Today is May the Fourteenth. Your birthday."

Calista looked at him with interest now. "It is?"

He nodded, watching her curiously. What exactly did it mean to her? Did she even know what it meant?

"So… I turn older today?" Her questioning tone seemed born of skepticism more than a lack of understanding.

He nodded, and set his coffee mug down, looking across the small wooden table at her. "Seven, I believe."

She nodded slowly, and then grinned fleetingly. Her smiles were still rare enough that he recognized them as precious commodity. "I'm older than Jessica now," she said brightly, and Severus, who knew who Jessica was from reading her journal, chuckled a little.

"That's not quite the way it works, Calista," he said, "I'm afraid that, dreadful as she is, Jessica is also aging at the same rate you are."

Calista wrinkled the bridge of her nose in her characteristic fashion. "Today is her birthday, too?"

"Doubtfully," Severus said, waving his hand as if he had better things to tell her about than the rate at which Jessica would grow older, "Don't waste your time worrying about that. As I said, it's your birthday, which means that you get to have extra fun today."

"I do?" she looked at him as if trying to decide if he was serious or not.

"Certainly. We'll start with sweets."

Calista's eyes grew so round they nearly filled her face. "Sweets in the middle of _breakfast_?"

"Well. It is a special occasion. I suppose just this once."

Severus drew his wand from his pocket and waved it at the center of the table, where a small plate of Cauldron Cakes appeared. It rarely occurred to him to provide sweets, and Calista never asked, so this was something special.

Calista smiled, and even though it still would not _quite_ reach her eyes, it did a good enough job scrunching up her cheeks that Severus was suddenly very glad he had decided to give Calista a birthday that he had never had.

"I have to get to work," he told her, "But when I'm finished, we're going on a special trip." For what seemed like the first time, he took in her messy appearance. "We're leaving the castle, so it might be a good idea for you to tidy you hair and, er… wash the cake crumbs off your mouth."

Biting back another chuckle, Severus left the flat to go to his classes.

**o-o-o-o-o**

As was his custom, Severus checked in on the flat quickly between each class. He didn't always see Calista, and he trusted that she'd be generally okay in the flat by herself, but the idea of leaving a six – now, seven – year old alone for hours on end was unsettling, even if he did always charm the door to his workroom firmly shut and locked.

In between his third-year Slytherin/Griffindor class and his seventh-year NEWT students, he saw Calista in the small kitchen, pulling a comb through her stubborn hair, her pale face strained as she tugged on a nasty tangle and winced.

Seeing what a difficult time she was having, Severus placed his hand on her shoulder lightly. "Hold still," he cautioned, and waved his wand above her head with a complicated motion. The tangled strands unraveled themselves, and silky dark hair lay perfectly straight down her back, reaching almost to the back of her knees. Severus knew absolutely nothing about the sorts of spells used for hairstyling, so he performed a simple Severing Charm to trim her hair to a more manageable length, ending in the middle of her back. It was a little uneven, but he doubted she'd care, and he was already late for his next class.

"That was a little easier, eh?" he said before he hurried to teach his seventh-years.

When Severus finally finished his last class of the day, he hadn't even closed his office door behind him when Calista appeared in the doorway, her face bright with anticipation.

"Where are we going?" she asked. He held up one hand, and walked over to his desk, where he set a sheaf of parchment down. He would have to correct this later, as Calista was obviously not going to be put off a moment.

"We're going to Hogsmeade. It's a little town that isn't far from the castle."

"What are we going to do there?" she asked, nearly bouncing in place with anticipatory energy. He hadn't realized she was so eager to leave the castle, but he supposed she might be feeling cooped up in the dungeons.

"We'll see," he said silkily, as if it was of no consequence, and not even worth thinking about. In truth, he had been planning this expedition for weeks now.

**o-o-o-o-o**

As soon as they were outside, Calista ran ahead of him. He moved to stop her, and then he saw that she wasn't going far; she ran ahead a ways, and then waited, bouncing from foot to foot energetically. He had never seen her like this.

"Is this Hogsmeade?" she asked breathlessly every time they came to a building on the grounds, or a fencepost, or a woodpile, or, for that matter, an unusually large rock. He had to try hard to hold back a smirk by the fourth time she asked, and refrained himself from speaking in favor of simply shaking his head in case his voice betrayed his wry amusement.

"You seem awfully chipper all of a sudden," he finally commented, being so far removed from his own childhood that he couldn't remember if this was normal or not.

"It smells like sky outside," she chirped, and he was sorry he had asked. He had no idea what she was talking about, but before he could ask her to clarify, she was running across the castle grounds again, chasing after a small white butterfly that had crossed her path.

He had no idea children liked the outdoors so much. He would have to remember this. He could not help but feel that he still knew nothing about parenting, but he mused that he had to be doing something right, because Calista seemed to be making progress every single day.

**o-o-o-o-o**

If Severus had thought Calista was excited about their outing, he had seen nothing until he ushered her inside the Magical Menagerie II, Hogsmeade's smaller spinoff of the original store in Diagon Alley. It had been opened less than a year ago because of the town's popularity with Hogwarts students, in the hopes of getting the children's Galleons even after the semester had begun.

Calista was entranced as soon as they entered, her eyes wide as she took in all the preening, chirping, meowing, squawking animals. He simply watched her face fill with astonishment as she looked around the store, which was actually less than half the size of its London counterpart.

"Can I help you, mister?" The witch behind the counter had a large wart on her nose and masses of frizzy grey ringlets. Her fingers looked knotted and were covered with gold rings of varying thicknesses.

"Not myself," he said softly, gently nudging Calista forward with a palm on her shoulder, "But this young lass would like to purchase a kitten."

Calista looked up at him, and the look in her eyes was more than enough assurance for him that he had planned this properly, after all. She looked back at the witch behind the counter, then up at him again, and opened her mouth, finally.

"_Really?"_ she said, her voice so tiny it was like a mew of a kitten itself. Severus nodded as casually as he could, enjoying the charade that this was a sudden whim. The look of sheer joy on her face was priceless, and refreshingly innocent.

"Ooh, a kitten?" the witch said, false but well-intentioned enthusiasm welling up in her voice, "Well, let's see what we have, shall we?" Severus could tell that Calista saw through the witch's feigned excitement, but she didn't pay much attention to the witch at all once she had been led to a large glass case in the front corner of the shop. Inside, a dozen kittens curled up and catnapped, or chased their tails, or cleaned their paws. They all looked the same to Severus, but Calista studied them as if this was a life or death choice.

Calista peered through the glass at the assortment of young cats, and Severus followed her gaze. His line of sight was constantly interrupted by a grey blur – he supposed it was another kitten, but it wouldn't stay still long enough for him to tell – that kept darting around in the enclosure, occasionally making a valiant attempt to climb the charmed walls of the clear cage. He wondered how Calista managed to see any of the other cats with that one zipping around the way it was. It was starting to get on his nerves, the way it demanded attention.

"I want that one," Calista announced, and Severus looked down, relieved that the decision had been made and they could finally leave. Then, he froze and his jaw tightened a little.

Severus, with his limited knowledge of children, couldn't possibly have known that, given an assortment of cute, furry animals to choose from, a child will _always_, without fail, choose the most rambunctious, annoying, and frankly maddening specimen there was, or he might seriously have considered simply picking out a cat himself.

However, a promise was a promise, and Severus cringed as the witch pulled the zippy little furball out of the enclosure. Twice, it almost got away while she was putting a charmed leash on it so that Calista could walk it home. Severus couldn't help but be slightly disappointed that it didn't get away before he paid for it, but the witch had managed to contain it, and so he was left to deal with the little monster as they left the shop.

Calista's small face was aglow as she held onto her end of the blue leash when they began their walk back to the castle. Severus caught himself thinking that it was almost worth the wretched, manic, shedding ball of fur that was about to claim his flat for its own simply for the joy it brought to Calista. Then the little kitten nipped at his ankle, and he changed his mind.

"This is my happiest birthday ever!" she exclaimed, and in the same breath declared, "Her name is Yellow."

"She's grey," he felt obligated to point out, and Calista looked at him as if he had five heads.

"Yes, but my favorite color is yellow," she told him patiently, and before he quite knew what to say, she was already dashing ahead of him, the atrocious little monster of a kitten in tow.

* * *


	13. Chapter Eleven

**Always In Your Shadow**

Chapter Eleven

When Severus and Calista finished going through the most common potions ingredients used, Severus decided to retry their failed attempt at practical learning. By the time they had reached this point, Calista was almost eight years old, and he saw that there was a marked difference in her attention to detail. Perhaps it was the age difference, or perhaps it was because she was no longer rebelling so openly to being corrected.

It was a slow process, but eventually Calista opened up more and more, revealing herself in bits and pieces. Over the course of her eighth year, Severus learned that Calista's favorite thing to read about was, of all things, magical theory. He still wasn't quite certain if she actually enjoyed the subject matter (which he found hard to believe) or if she was pursuing the matter because of her still-standing insecurities about her own potential.

Severus remained convinced that Calista did have magical potential, although she had yet to demonstrate this in any way besides occlumency and legilimancy. Severus knew that some children took longer than others to show potential, and though he recognised that Calista was past the age where most children would begin gaining awareness of their ability, he was certain it was there. Calista, on the other hand, remained unconvinced, no matter what he said to her.

In fact, there were a great many areas in which Calista doubted herself, and Severus found it somewhat disconcerting. He had never met another child who had so few aspirations, or so little self-esteem. It was things like this that reminded him so fiercely of himself as a child, but he had at least had Hogwarts to look forward to. Calista would not believe that she would be able to attend, no matter how often he told her she would.

Calista's low self-esteem was a cause of much frustration to Severus, who found her not only to be extremely bright, but also quite charming when she wanted to be. There were small moments that allowed Severus to glimpse what Calista might have been like had Bellatrix not been her mother. The cat, for instance. Young as she was, Severus had never once seen her show anything but a gentle affection for the wretched cat, while Severus himself was hard-pressed simply to avoid kicking it out of his way when Calista was around.

Perhaps it was not strictly in Calista's nature to be peevish and stubborn, but she often was. She was no quicker to warm to anyone else than she had been to him; on the occasions where he and Calista encountered other people, whether in the castle or out, Calista more often than not responded with silence. Occasionally, if prodded, she would murmur short, one-word replies when questioned on anything (and young children are questioned on a surprisingly vast amount of inconsequential matters) but Severus was on the verge of deciding that it wasn't worth the effort anymore. The two of them had visited with Albus Dumbledore at least a dozen times and she had barely uttered a halting "Hullo," each time.

The most frustrating part about Calista's silences and short responses was that she _wasn't_ shy. Whenever Severus asked her why she wouldn't speak to anyone, her reply was invariably "Why should I?", and the question was not facetious. Severus was hardly one to offer politeness as a reason to do anything, and so he murmured something about her needing to make friends, and the look she gave him was quite scathing for a child. Eventually, this became yet another of the many arguments that Severus simply didn't have the patience to have with his daughter, who in most cases simply wanted to feel that she had won, and placed little importance on actually being right.

Severus also learned trivial bits about his daughter, things he never would have given thought to before, but he found that once he knew these things, he was glad he did. He learned that her favorite flower was a lily, a tidbit which he found more than coincidental. Her learned that she liked strawberries, didn't like to eat meat at breakfast, and would choose orange juice over pumpkin juice. She wanted to have her ears pierced, but was afraid it would hurt, and she wanted to dress up like she had seen other girls her age do at the orphanage, but was too self-conscious of her perceived unattractiveness to bother. In fact, he learned that there was a great list of things that Calista wanted to do, but was afraid of being mocked for. He learned that she was very good at hiding her feelings, but that she was easily hurt by things that other people said about her. She trusted others' assessment of her more than she trusted her own judgment, and she often second-guessed herself.

Calista was learning things about her father, too. She slowly came to understand that his cool tone and biting responses didn't always mean that he was upset with her, but often meant that he was strained, or didn't know how to address a situation. She learned that her father, like herself, sometimes said things he didn't mean when he _was_ angry, and that he had as difficult a time apologising as she did. She knew that he had some memories that were quite as sad as her own, but she didn't know what they were. She knew that he absolutely _hated_ cats, especially Yellow, and she knew that he had no patience for people that chose not to learn.

Sometimes, Calista liked to see how far she could push her father. Sometimes she was purposely rebellious, and sometimes she tried to say the most hurtful thing she could think of. She didn't know quite why she did this, and she almost always felt horrible afterwards, but she couldn't stop the ugly words from coming out of her mouth any more than she could take them back after they had been said.

Calista's outbursts of misbehaviour were often followed by the thought that her father would send her away, that he must have had enough of her antics by now, and although she had succeeded in making him very angry more than once, he had never sent her away, nor had he ever laid a hand on her. This was so unusual for Calista that more than once she provoked him to anger to see if she could make him hit her, or curse her.

She had never succeeded in making him resort to violence, and even Calista herself couldn't quite verbalise how happy this made her feel inside. She had, however, succeeded in being sent to her room a great many times, and she'd had to copy lines from books more times than she cared to remember. She did things that she knew would have infuriated her mother, sending her reaching for her wand to inflict pain on the girl, and never once had her father even shown that the thought had crossed his mind.

Calista had once thought that if she could escape the life she had, if she could live with someone like Severus, that she would be happy and her problems would fade away, but she found she wasn't entirely correct in that assumption. There were still days when the memory of things her mother had done made her feel frightened or small, and each time a twinge of pain ran along the scars on her back, she felt so miserable that it was all she could do not to cry.

She also didn't know why she so often felt compelled to make her father angry with her. She was glad to be with him, and she was grateful for everything he did for her. She always told herself that she would stop, that she would behave properly, would treat him with the same thoughtfulness that he treated her, but it was very difficult to do, especially during her first two years with him. It became a little easier as time went by, but there were many times that she could scarcely believe the awful things she did and said.

Calista couldn't have understood that what she was going through was actually quite normal for children with a history of abuse and neglect, that this was one way of releasing pain and anger arising from abandonment issues, and although Severus wouldn't have explained it in quite those terms, he actually did have a fairly good idea of why she was acting the way she was, since he had gone through very similar feelings at her age. He tried to be as patient as he possibly could, but although he never showed it, there were a few times when Calista's hurtful words struck their target dead-on, and made him question whether living with him was truly what was best for her, whether he was up to the task of parenting.

In the end though, Severus pushed through these most difficult parts of their relationship, because he remembered what it had been like to feel abandoned and neglected, and he refused to do this disservice to Calista, no matter how hard she pushed him. Through her worst temper tantrums and her most horrid declarations, he would not give up on her, no matter how trying her dramatics often were.

Thankfully, a few months after her eighth birthday, the worst of her demonstrations began to dwindle away, and Severus had the distinct impression that he had passed a test that neither of them had known they were going through.

During the worst of their fallouts, Severus had used legilimancy to connect with her mind. He had guessed correctly that much of her aggression towards him stemmed from memories and experiences that were too painful or difficult for her to work through on her own, and she would never volunteer information like that, as if she feared that by giving voice to the horrors she had undergone, they would resurface. Severus saw a nearly endless stream of terrible images of Calista's abuse at Bellatrix's hands (or wand) and vowed solemnly that, not only would Bellatrix never have the opportunity to harm their daughter again, but that she would pay in blood for the horrors she had already wrought upon his child.

The stem of many of their worst arguments was the discussion of the things he had gleaned from Calista's memories. She never wanted to discuss them and almost always responded with anger when he brought them up, but Severus knew that she would never get past these things if they didn't work through them together. He was at somewhat of a loss, because he never knew what to say, but he did the best he could, reassuring Calista, even when she didn't want to be reassured, that these things would never happen to her again, that he would protect her.

It was a difficult, but necessary, journey for both of them, and in the end, when they finally made it through the worst of the storm, they found that their once tenuous bond had become infinitely stronger, that they had a deep respect for each other, and that, somewhere in the years-long struggle, they had become a family. Severus could never pinpoint exactly when it had occurred, but there came a point when Calista began to confide in him voluntarily when something was bothering her, and when something was too difficult for her to verbalise, he would feel the now-familiar brushing at the edge of his mind, an invitation from his daughter to see what was upsetting her.

Another set of lessons entirely that Calista was learning from her father was how to gain some control over her gifts of occlumency and legilimancy. By the time she was nine, she was able, when she tried very carefully, to call a set of scenes or sounds directly to the front of her mind, so that Severus would see these before anything else. When she did this, Severus was always careful to respect her boundaries and delve no further than the things she had brought to the surface, and it went a long way towards establishing trust between the two of them.

Calista never even attempted to gain access to Severus' mind, whether because she knew it would be too difficult, or simply out of respect for his privacy. In the beginning, it was probably more of the former, and as time went on it was primarily the latter. Her ability to brush his mind with her own, to send an unspoken summons to him was something that began to develop after they had resolved most of their acclimation issues, and, recently, there had been an occasion or two when Severus had felt her distress without her trying to reach out to him.

While Severus tried more than once to impart to Calista that this small bit of control she was able to exercise over her powers of occlumency indicated the presence of magical potential, she did not believe him until the day she cast her first spell. It had been such a small, inconsequential circumstance, and yet the moment had been monumental for her.

During one of their many potions lessons, he had been supervising while she carefully followed the directions to make Boil-Cure Potion, a mixture that Severus often used as one of the first assignments for his first-years, as the nature of it allowed a very small chance for dangerous mistakes, a reason that suited it to be one of the first that Calista attempted by herself. While she had been measuring out porcupine quills, she had glanced at the cauldron of horned slugs nearby, and a flame erupted beneath it, sending the slimy solution into a gentle simmer. She had been so surprised that she dropped the quills, sending them rolling off the work table and onto the floor.

Calista had stared at the cauldron in disbelief, and then looked at her father, as if for reassurance that she wasn't imagining what had just happened. Severus, who had been reasonably sure that something like this would happen soon, simply nodded at her. "Congratulations," he said, with a small smile, "You should pick those quills up off the floor and add them to the cauldron before it boils."

The potion had come out a little too thick and was more like a paste, but it still performed the function it was made for, and Calista had come away from that lesson with a boost to her self-esteem that was far greater than she would have received simply from getting the potion to come out perfectly.

Almost as soon as Calista had inadvertently cast that first spell, there were dozens more. She found, to her utter delight, that she could do simple things, such as light the fire beneath a cauldron, or rinse out a glass, deliberately, and without a wand.

Without a doubt, however, Calista's favorite bit of magic to work involved the endless unidentifiable drawings she produced. One of the newfound talents she discovered was indeed an unusual, if somewhat useless, ability to manipulate the lines of her drawings after they had been produced, by willing them to look the way she had imagined them when she had set out to draw them. Suddenly, all of the indeterminable scribbles stuck on the walls of their flat became drawings. The vast majority of them were of cats. Severus would never tell Calista, but he preferred the scribbles.

As for _the_ cat, Yellow, it had more than made itself at home. It seemed to have an innate ability to know exactly where Severus was intending to walk or sit, and could be counted on to be precisely in his way at all times. When the cat wasn't busy getting in Severus' way, it followed Calista around like a very small and furry shadow, which pleased the little girl so immensely that sometimes it was the only circumstance that kept Severus from 'accidentally' letting the cat get lost outside the castle.

Calista was still in need of a mild sleeping draught most nights, and on a few nights he had been forced to give her something stronger. On a particularly bad night, after a day where Calista's back had been hurting her persistently, but she hadn't said a word about it, her nightmares had come on so strong that Severus had felt obliged to give her a Draught of the Living Dead, a mixture so potent that there were laws written about its prohibited uses, and while giving them to an underaged witch was almost certainly one of them, he hadn't cared at the time. As Calista began to reach out unconsciously for him when she was distressed, he was also awoken in the night several times by a foreign sensation of terror that was somewhere outside of his own mind, yet was as clear to him as if it were a shrill whistle in his ears. He began to recognise this as an awareness of Calista's nightmares.

It became undeniable that the two were sharing a strong mental bond after a while, and Severus wasn't entirely certain if it was because of their genetic relationship or their emotional one, but he was glad for it, because it gave him a good indication of when Calista really needed him, since she wouldn't always tell him herself. He wondered if she could sense any of his feelings, but she never mentioned anything about it, and he didn't ask.


	14. Chapter Twelve

**Always In Your Shadow**

Chapter Twelve:

Severus and Calista grew closer the longer they struggled to make a family out of their meager gathering of two wounded hearts. Once the initial distance between them had all but diminished, Severus found that his connection with Calista grew at an astounding rate, and not simply for the experiences they shared mundanely.

As her trust in him became implicit, he found that at times he was very closely in tune with his daughter's thoughts. Sometimes she was aware of his presence in her mind, and other times he was certain she was not, for he was able to access memories and ideas that he knew she didn't want to share with him, but there was no protection around these private visions. In fact, Severus was struck by the absurdity of this; in everyone's mind there were things that were locked away, hidden in side rooms of the mind, things that weren't visible at the topmost level of consciousness.

Calista's mind was different. As she grew older, the mist and shadows that separated her everyday thoughts from her wretched memories grew thinner and wispier. He truly did place a high value on his daughter's privacy, and often refrained from exploring the landscape of her mind, but on the occasions that he did peruse her thoughts, he found that the shadowy, haunting memories of her early childhood existed right next to the memory of what she had eaten for breakfast the day before.

By the time Calista was six months into her eleventh year, Severus came to understand that there was something drastically wrong with the landscape of his daughter's mind. When he swept over the surface of her consciousness he felt as if he was treading upon a spider's web. There were gaping holes in her mind, looming pits of blackness into which he could easily fall if he were to misjudge as he roamed among her memories. He sensed, below the thin, delicate strands of the web, a strange, foreboding _emptiness_ that felt familiar in some distant way, but he couldn't say exactly how.

On the surface, Calista seemed immensely improved from the damaged child he had taken in, and perhaps she was, but the strange, chilling emptiness beneath the weakest of barriers worried him nonetheless. If only he could remember _where_ he had seen or felt something like that before, perhaps he would understand why it frightened him so.

**o-o-o-o**

Calista progressed with her studies, and Severus judged that in the next nine months or so before she began at Hogwarts, Calista would reach roughly third-year proficiency in the art of potion-making. It was more difficult to judge her level of skill in the field of Occlumency, because it seemed to be different from one day to the next.

Shortly after turning ten years old, Calista had abruptly lost interest in Legilimancy lessons, and her progress there had since been slow. He held the lessons less often, at first presuming that it was too rigorous for her, thinking that he had again misjudged the capabilities of a child her age, but he saw no rise in enthusiasm, and by six months into this strange dry spell, it was becoming frustrating.

"Calista." Severus said wearily, feeling only the barest brush against the outermost barriers of his conscious mind, "Are you even trying anymore?"

Calista's inky-black eyes, which never ceased to remind him startlingly of his own, glared back at him.

"I'm just not good at this, alright? Can we be finished now?"

Severus sighed loudly. "We can be finished once you've made an actual effort. You did better than this when you were six, for Merlin's sake." He caught himself just in time before he had substituted a more colorful phrase.

"Maybe I just can't do it anymore!" she screeched, her voice unnaturally high, in an emotional outburst that had seemed uncharacteristic until a few months ago. She rose, no doubt with the intention of storming out of his office, where most of their lessons were held, but he moved sideways, blocking the doorway into their quarters.

"I demand to know what is going on," he said, his jaw clenched, months of patience fraying away to nothing. "You have not been yourself, and you are trying my patience with your newfound insolence."

The small, wiry ten-year old stamped her foot angrily, spots of color rising to her pale cheeks. In truth, this was unusual for Calista, who typically had a much tighter reign over her emotions, until recently. She didn't reply, but strode towards him, making to dodge past him and out the door. Severus stood his ground, placing his hand on her shoulder in a firm grip as she tried to pass.

"Calista," he intoned, his voice cold and angry enough to send any of his first years away in tears, "Speak to me." Unlike in previous years, it was a command rather than a plea, perhaps fueled by the uneasiness he had long been feeling regarding the tenacious separation of her conscious and subconscious.

Now that he thought about it, these oddities in her behavior had begun almost exactly when he had discovered the abnormalities in her mind. He thought back, tying to pinpoint the timing exactly, but there was nothing that seemed significant. In fact, she had been excelling in all of her lessons, had recently proved a budding talent in Legilimancy that far surpassed his expectations of her abilities at so young an age. There was nothing unusual, nothing that he could blame for her sudden change.

Calista stood still and silent at her father's command, and when it was clear she would give no response, he lifted her chin with his free hand, turning her face to his. Her eyes snapped shut, although he was beyond the point of needing eye contact to connect with his daughter's mind. Still, he was taken aback, for it had been a long time since she had been so unwilling to share her thoughts with him. He had thought they had a certain measure of trust between them.

He didn't have time to ponder this before he felt a strange sensation tugging at him. It was something he had not felt in recent memory, a dark tentacle of thought reaching towards his mind. It was not a feeling he had ever associated with Calista. This thought, this probe, whatever it was, was something sinister, something that filled him with instant revulsion, and he recoiled, loosening his grip on Calista. As soon as his hand left her shoulder, the sensation was gone, and he looked at the girl, startled. She still wore her rebellious expression, and there was nothing in her face that indicated she had had anything to do with the foreboding piece of legilimancy he had just felt.

"What was that? What did you do?" he stammered, no longer certain that he had felt what he thought he had, but needing to say something.

He expected Calista to glare at him, to snap a heated reply. He didn't expect her shoulders to slump, didn't expect the mix of confusion and incredible sadness in her eyes. He certainly didn't expect her reply.

Calista's young voice shook with tears as she murmured softly, "I… don't know."

Her wounded, startled expression made him yearn to pull her into an embrace, to comfort her as she had not allowed him to do for months, but he still felt in his bones the chill of what had transpired, and he simply moved aside, to let her leave the room.

**o-o-o-o-o**

Severus began to feel Calista's nightmares regularly again; they were every night now, but she was keeping him out, somehow. Each time he came to her and tried to soothe her, he found that her mind was an eerie blank wall, like a sheet of blackness beneath which the stuff of her nightmares remained concealed from him.

Severus was struck again and again by the blackness that surrounded her dreams. Something was not right; this wall, it was unlike anything he had felt in Calista. Had it not been lodged in her mind, in fact, Severus would have sworn that it was not of her making; but it had to be. It was in her mind. No one else could have put it there. Still, he didn't understand why he could feel her distress, but not see what caused it.

The feeling, when it woke him in the wee hours of the morning, was the same it had been for some time; a sort of pleading desperation, as if his daughter was calling out for his assurances and protection with her physical voice. Each time he strode the short distance to her room, he expected to see her sitting up at the edge of her bed, arms open to him, waiting for him to comfort her, but each night she was still asleep. He could not wake her, and he could not see through the veil that hung over her nightmares.

One night, he was dragged from slumber yet again by the tugging feeling that Calista _needed_ him. He could feel her terror as though it were physically pulling him towards her, could feel her crying out for him to save her from the nightmare. But she wasn't, was she? Wouldn't he arrive in her room, only to find that she was sound asleep, and that he could not wake her?

This time, as Severus approached her door, he heard sobbing from inside the room. He threw the door open, his wand lit and clutched in the bony fingers of his right hand. Calista was not in her bed, but curled up in the corner of the room. Her head was tilted back, her mouth open in a wail. Sobs poured from her throat like nothing he had heard from her before, and Severus rushed to her side, pulling her into an embrace, despite the strain between them recently.

Something was wrong, though. She felt clammy and warm, and when his arms encircled her the skin of her back nearly burned his hands through her nightclothes.

"_Calista!"_ he shouted urgently, hurling himself towards her mind, thinking of nothing but saving her from whatever horrible memory had her gripped so tightly in its clutches.

He ran straight into the blank, impassable wall, and howled in frustration. Cursing, he lifted his daughter in his arms and carried her into his office. He set her down in the chair behind his desk, and rummaged through the shelves of his study, pushing bottles and flasks aside haphazardly. Ah. Here it was.

Severus uncorked the tiny vial of crystal-clear liquid, and holding Calista's chin in one hand, forced three drops of the potion onto her tongue.

**o-o-o-o-o**

It didn't take long for the Veritaserum to take effect. He watched as Calista's pupils dilated slightly, as her grip on the arms of the chair relaxed, the subtle signs that the potion had done its job.

"What is your name?" he asked, the standard question to begin an interrogation under the influence of the strong truth serum.

"Calista." she replied in a monotone.

"Surname?"

She faltered, hesitating. Impossible. It was the strongest truth serum known to the wizarding world, and he had given her more than enough. It was utterly impossible that she could resist its effects. That left only one possibility. The only way she could respond to a question this way was if she was unsure of the answer.

"Le…" there was a strained choking sound in her throat, and she exhaled.

"Snape?" she said, and though it was still monotone it was still more of a question than an answer.

Severus' eyes bored through her, completely unnerved by this.

"What is happening to you, Calista?" he asked softly, more to himself than to her. But she had taken the Veritaserum. Whether or not he had intended it, she was bound to answer the question truthfully. She was so deep under the potion's influence that she no longer had any idea where she was or who she was speaking to. She knew only the answers to the questions she was asked.

The words came from her mouth in a constant, matter-of-fact stream. It was surreal, the unbelievable statements that came out so neutrally, the results of the potent brew he had given her. It was all he could do to listen to the end, instead of losing his composure entirely.

"My mother is in my mind. Her thoughts are my thoughts. I am engaged in a constant battle of wills, hers against mine. I am fighting her, but I can only do so much. I am exhausted. I am getting weaker. I cannot resist her control much longer, because she uses my own mind against me. My magical potential was released too suddenly, and I didn't know what to do with it. I wanted to know what happened to my mother. I wanted to know if she was sorry. I reached out with legilimancy, and I found her. She felt me searching. She seized the energy I sent to find her, followed it back to find me. She knows where I am now. She wants me back. She wants me to help her escape Azkaban and to help her restore the Dark Lord. She believes there will be a blood sacrifice required to bring him back, and she wants me to be it."

Severus exercised all of his self-control to phrase his next question calmly.

"How is she doing this, Calista? How is she controlling you?"

The girl's monotone came back, loud and clear and undeniably true.

"She knew where all the weak places in my barriers were. She found them all, she tore down all of my defenses one by one. There is almost nothing left. I am afraid to wander through my own thoughts, because there is only the merest web of my own defenses between my real thoughts and the madness she has created within me. Even now, she works diligently at my web of defense, tearing it apart strand by strand. Once my defenses are gone she will have all the control. She creates shields to block my father out so he cannot help me."

"What happens when your defenses are gone, Calista?" He needed to know the answer, knew that she couldn't sense the strain in his voice any more than she even knew she was being questioned.

"I will fall through, into madness. The elements have always been there. My father helped me heal, and taught me to put the bad things in the past. My mother took all of the bad things and made them real again. I can hear her every day, calling me from below. She wants me to descend into the madness beneath my web. I do not want to go, but I do not know how to fight her much longer."

"This is impossible," Severus growled, speaking to himself again. "I knew Bellatrix. She isn't that powerful. She doesn't have nearly your potential for Legilimancy and Occlumency. You should be able to fight her. _I_ should be able to break through and fight her."

Even though it was not technically a question, Calista answered him.

"She is not strong enough. But I am. She is using my own potential against me. I have a lot of power and not enough training or knowledge to use it. My mother has none of the power but all of the knowledge, but she can control mine as long as she stays in my mind."

Severus saw the small girl tremble, saw her eyes blink slowly, and knew that the potion was wearing off. He didn't know if Bellatrix was privy to this conversation, but he knew that giving Calista another dose would increase the likelihood that Bellatrix did find out. He had to get all of the information he could now, in the last few moments of her trance.

"Where did she get the knowledge?" he asked urgently, "And how was she able to get into your mind in the first place?"

"The Dark Lord taught her many things. He taught her to control powers that were not her own. He taught her long ago that sealing his Mark into the skin would ensure that bearer of the Mark would never be truly free. She has known for a long time that this day would come. She knew the day she carved the Dark Mark into my skin, that as long as it remained, I would be always within reach, always in her shadow."

"How can I help you?" Severus said hoarsely, but by the time the question was out, he was staring into cold, glittering eyes and he knew his time was up.


	15. Chapter Thirteen

**Always In Your Shadow**

Chapter Thirteen

Immediately following Calista's eerie revelations while under the influence of Veritaserum, Severus began plotting. He knew instinctively that he would not find much help in books or studies; somehow he knew that the key to helping Calista was somewhere in him, in all that he knew of Bellatrix, Calista, and Lord Voldemort. Perhaps just as importantly, the answer was within all that he knew of Occlumency and Legilimancy.

Because Calista had given her own name under the influence of the truth serum, he knew that she was still in control of her identity, to some degree, but he feared her control was waning rapidly, since the majority of her words had sounded more like Bellatrix. What really caught his attention, however, was when Calista had spoken about falling through into madness. He could see Bellatrix's fingerprints all over that particular method. Madness was Bellatrix's lover, the thing she would always turn to in the night to keep from being alone. It was also her weapon of choice against others.

Severus felt his blood run hot with rage when he considered Bellatrix's intentions. No, it would not be enough for her to attack and destroy their child, to send her as an unwilling aide and, ultimately, sacrifice to Lord Voldemort. Bellatrix would toy with Calista first, twisting her own abilities and thoughts into something sinister and unrecognizable, filling her mind with unspeakable things until the only refuge the girl could find would be in the recesses of insanity.

Severus continued to watch Calista carefully, this time armed with a cursory knowledge of what was happening to her. He didn't want to end their lessons, simply because it gave him time to watch her closely, but he didn't want to teach her anything that Bellatrix would be able to use. He kept their lessons as bland and useless as possible, but didn't discontinue them.

Despite his observations, Severus didn't learn anything useful quickly enough, and he worried that his window of time was narrowing. He needed to purge Calista of Bellatrix's influence before Bellatrix had too strong of a foothold in the girl's mind; before she had enough mastery of Calista's abilities to become truly dangerous. He had never heard of anything quite like this, and so he didn't know how or when it would progress, but he intended to put a stop to it before then.

Only a few days went by before Severus gave up on external observation. He needed to see exactly what was going on between Bellatrix and Calista, and the only place to do that was from within Calista's mind. He would simply have to take the risk that Bellatrix might sense his intrusion; it was a risk he was willing to take, because he had confidence that his abilities would shield him sufficiently. Inherent talent or not, Calista was still a child, and Bellatrix, in Severus' experience, thought herself a great deal more powerful than she actually was. Over the years, he had allowed her to keep this misguided perception, never showing his full potential to her. He had successfully fooled the Dark Lord, and he knew he could as easily fool Bellatrix Lestrange.

**o-o-o-o-o**

Severus summoned Calista to his office late at night. When she arrived, he barely glanced up, pointing to the room's other chair.

"Sit," he said sharply, allowing no emotion or thought to show in his expression. Until he knew exactly what situation he was dealing with, he would take no risk of exposing himself, or his relationship with Calista, to Bellatrix. He had to treat the small girl that sat across his desk from him as if she _were_ Bellatrix, for now.

Calista lifted her pale face to his as she settled in the chair. Her eyes were odd; flat and yet somehow expressive at the same time. There was a vulnerable, pitiable look in them that he had never seen. He had seen Calista sad, and afraid, of course; but this look was different. It was not the look of a hurt child trying to be strong. It was a look of sheer submissiveness, the look of a child who has given up. It revealed everything, and hid nothing. He felt a queer sensation somewhere in the pit of his stomach, as if he had been kicked. Something in her face made him feel guilty, as if he were responsible for her obvious pain.

"Are you mad at me, Daddy? Do you hate me, too?" The voice was Calista's, but it wasn't like he had ever heard it before. There was no defiance behind the tremble, no fight behind the hurt. It was, like the look in her eyes, pitiful. And she had never, ever called him 'Daddy'. It was always 'Father' if it was anything at all. More often than not, she didn't bother to call him anything. Since he was the only person she spoke to consistently, there wasn't really a need to differentiate. He felt the kick in his stomach again.

"I'm a bad daughter," Calista continued, in the same defeated, pitiful tone. "No one could ever love me. You are going to send me away, because you hate me. Please don't send me away." He felt something strange in his gut again, but this time it was like an icy stone forming there. Rage threatened to boil his very blood.

Perhaps the desperate, lonely child before him would have affected him differently if he had not taken the time to truly get to know his daughter. If he had taken her at face value for the brave face she liked to put on, or if he had listened only to the thread of lonely, miserable feelings that had woven itself into the fabric of who she was. Perhaps if he had only cared for Calista out of obligation, if he had not spent countless hours connecting with her, he would have broken down and let Calista leave the room with assurances that her words were not true, that he wasn't going to send her away.

However, Severus cared for Calista in another way, in a way that Bellatrix would never be able to fully understand. He truly loved his daughter, and he knew that the tear-streaked and vulnerable face before him was no more Calista than the silent, defiant child with blank eyes had been four years ago. She was strong, she was fragile. She was angry and vengeful, but she had compassion. She was sometimes cold, sometimes warm. She was not a typical child in that she had suffered far beyond what she should have, but she was far from an adult. Severus knew his daughter, and he knew that there were parts of her that might feel as hopeless as the girl before him would indicate.

He also knew that, no matter the circumstances, Calista would never offer her pain and insecurities up so openly, allowing them to be so easily used against her. She had suffered and she had survived, and she held the same convictions he did when it came to hiding her wounds. Exposed, they offered too much opportunity for her to be hurt again. She would never be so careless, not when she _did_ possess such a gift for occlumency.

He saw the show of being a victim for exactly what it was; a show, and one of Bellatrix's making. It was so entirely typical of Bellatrix, to take something as sacred as the bond between a parent and child and try to exploit it. He refused to let her know how close her plan had come to working, and he looked back at the spiritless child with a cold, blank expression.

"There is no need for you to speak," he said, his voice chilled. He leveled his gaze with hers, and immediately felt an attempted intrusion into his thoughts. It was like the probe he had felt before, when he had first realized something was terribly wrong with his daughter; it was cold, alien. It was also eerily alike to Calista at the same time it was entirely different. It was as if the method was Calista's, but the intent was not. There was only one thing he could do to ensure that Bellatrix would never see the parts of himself that Calista could.

He closed his mind off entirely, behind a barrier that he had successfully employed against the Dark Lord himself countless times. It was harsh, forbidding, and absolutely impassable by anyone he had ever known. It meant that Calista would not be able to call to him if she needed him, but it also meant that Bellatrix would never see where his loyalties really existed, and would not see how much Calista truly meant to him.

Satisfied that he was protected from any intrusions himself, he let himself delve into Calista's mind. He came across the same blank, cold barrier he had seen before, but this time, armed as he was with the knowledge of who was actually creating it, he was able to pass through it with little trouble.

Occlumency was a tricky thing; natural aptitude and training had legions to do with how successful one could be at it, but it went beyond that. It was unlike other magical arts in this way, for part of success with Occlumency depended on inner harmony with the skill itself and the way it was used. Calista might have a good deal of talent, and Bellatrix a good deal of knowledge, but Occlumency was connected with the inner self perhaps more so than any other magical art. No matter how well-trained Bellatrix was, the talent would always lie within Calista, and if Calista was not a willing party to how it was being used, Bellatrix could never hope to reach its full potential.

Severus was recognised as being the best Occlumens known to the wizarding world, and part of the reason was because he had studied far more than others bothered to, and so he knew all the odd nuances of the art that other would not. For example, he knew that, whatever Voldemort might have told Bellatrix, Calista's raw, untrained ability could not be fully manipulated as long as Calista herself fought against it. He knew that Occlumency would not work properly if the will guiding it was not in unison, and that as long as Calista remained oppositional, Bellatrix couldn't fully use her.

Severus was willing to bet that Bellatrix was unaware of this, but he knew she would eventually realize that Calista's will was holding her back, and it was this revelation that he feared. Without Calista's mind present at all, Bellatrix would lose all access to Calista's talent in this particular field, but if Bellatrix succeeded in shattering Calista and sending her into madness, it wouldn't matter. His own secrets would be protected, but if his daughter was destroyed in the process, it would be for nothing.

**o-o-o-o-o**

The web was sparser than it had been. Severus had the sensation of wading through dark water as he entered Calista's mind, constantly pulled downwards by an insistent, malicious undercurrent. If he allowed himself to give in, he knew he would be pulled down through Calista's flimsy web of protection into the madness Bellatrix had created. If he was pulled under, there would be no way for him to save Calista from the same fate.

Dark, horrid images assaulted him as he swam through the chaos that the juncture of Bellatrix and Calista had created. He saw familiar scenes from Calista's early childhood, things he had already seen within her before, and there were new, horrid images he had not seen. He didn't know if they were real memories or if they were of Bellatrix's imagination, and he didn't allow himself to dwell on it. He had to find what was left of Calista, and find a way to help her fight.

Here and there, he caught threads of Calista's thoughts in their familiar streams of colour. They were like fronds of seaweed, coming up from the strongest joints in her makeshift web and reaching up to caress him as he passed. He could hear her doubts, her determination to carry on despite them. He could hear his own voice speaking to her as he had done in the past four years, could feel the strength that they were now giving to Calista. Each encouragement he had offered her, each time he had reassured her was anchoring the web of defense she had created against Bellatrix.

When he looked closer, Severus saw there were some places where Calista's web had frayed, almost snapped. The first such point he saw looked as though a frond of golden seaweed had been wrapped around the frayed ends, holding them together. He looked more closely at the bright thread and he heard his own voice suddenly, echoing.

"_I won't hurt you."_

The yellow thread glowed slightly, then returned to its original state, holding fast to the loose ends of Calista's web.

As Severus continued to explore, he found more and more places like this, where her fragile web had come close to snapping and had been reinforced by the threads of words that had once floated like music in her mind, but now were more like underwater plants, struggling to remain alive without drowning. Even though there were many different coloured threads that spoke in many different voices sprouting from the strands of the web, those that were actually holding the web together were all varying shades of yellow and green, and they all released his own voice when he neared them.

Although Severus had no conscious plan of where to look for Calista, he could feel that she was still trapped in this strange undersea-like world somewhere, and he allowed himself to be drawn in the direction of her presence. Here and there were parts of her, reminders that this place indeed belonged to her. Aside from the coloured threads, there were certain places that simply _felt_ like Calista, and he paused in these places whenever he felt overwhelmed by the sensation of the heavy water pressing on him, or whenever the current managed to tug him down slightly.

As he allowed himself to be drawn towards the place that Calista felt strongest, he noticed that the web beneath him was gradually becoming stronger. There were still places where the web had begun to fray, none looked as though they had actually snapped, and most of the threads themselves seemed thicker.

Finally, he approached a place that was clearly the center of the web that Calista had woven to keep Bellatrix's madness beneath the current. Here, the web was multicoloured, woven partly from threads of every colour imaginable. As he passed over the strands, they contained more than simply words. Some were images, some were feelings. Some were positive and some were negative, but all of them belonged explicitly to Calista.

Then, in the very center of the web, he saw her. She was floating above the place in the middle where all of the web's main threads joined, and she was working furiously, pulling coloured strands of the seaweed-like threads from where they floated in the water around her, and anchoring them to her web.

Severus approached her, and she looked at him with hard, determined dream-eyes. He heard her words echoing in the water around him.

_It's breaking. I need to fix it._

He looked down to where her hands worked, weaving the threads together and saw that the original web here, right in the strongest point at the center, was separating as fast as she could put it together. All of the original strands of the web were frayed apart, their ends floating loose in the current. A thin braid of colourful seaweed was all that was holding the web together here, at its most critical junction.

Even as he watched, the seaweed strands seemed to be dissolving, and he could feel the water getting heavier where they were, could feel the strange, alien presence that was Bellatrix pushing itself into this place, the last place where Calista was safe.

_I'm running out_, Calista's voice sounded frantic as it reached him through the choppy waves. Every second, Bellatrix's presence here grew stronger, and Calista's colourful threads dissolved more rapidly.

_What can I do to help you?_ Severus felt the strain of pushing his words through the heavy waters towards Calista, knew that soon, communication would no longer be possible.

The web beneath them snapped again, and Calista grabbed desperately at the floating ends as they dissolved.

_I don't know! It's not working anymore!_

A bubbling rush of chaotic hatred rose from beneath them, as if the madness and the current were rising simultaneously to fill this, the last safe spot. Bellatrix was wining.

_The web isn't strong enough, Calista. There has to be another way._ Severus forced the words through the heavy, darkening water.

_The book_, Calista's words reached him faintly as if they had been diluted by the water. Her tone was frantic but still held an edge of determination. _Could you read it?_

Severus kicked, frustrated, against the current, which now seemed hell-bent on pulling them both down. He knew that the shield he had created for himself would protect him, but he was helpless to save Calista from going under.

_What book?_ He called dimly to her, _Calista, there isn't time! We need to do something now!_

_Exactly_, her words were barely audible over the roar of the waves now, _I need more time._

The last of the coloured threads she was clinging to dissolved in the water's furious tides, and suddenly he knew what he had to do to give her more time.

Severus pushed through the water, using great reserves of his mental strength to swim the last few feet through Bellatrix's chaotic seas to reach his daughter. He reached out and embraced her dream-self, just as he had done the first time he entered her nightmares, so long ago. He put his lips over her ear, knowing that this was his last chance, that she would not be able to hear him anymore soon.

Inside him, the words were coiled up tightly, as if they, too, were buried beneath crushingly heavy layers of water. The tides within himself, the careful aloofness he had assembled over the years, the walls and fences he had built around his heart, were infinitely more powerful than the waves Bellatrix was creating around them. He almost lost Calista, could feel the tides yanking her fragile dream-self out of his grip, but he held on tight, his mouth pressed to her ear.

The knots came uncoiled. The words rose within him, and he whispered them to Calista.

_I love you, my daughter._

The water still pressed heavy around them, but the current weakened, the dark chaos subsiding slightly. He looked down, and saw that the torn part of the web was now held together with a thick rope of green and yellow strands.

Even as he watched, the edges of this new rope of coloured seaweed-threads began to dissolve away into the waves, but he had bought them some time. The rope was thick.

_There is your time_, he managed to whisper through the waves, feeling strangely hollow, exposed. Part of him regretted the words that he had never been able to say, regretted showing such foolish weakness, even to her. But part of him saw the necessity of what he had said, and all of him knew that the words had been true, as difficult as they had been to say.

Calista lifted her chin, her eyes full to the brim of fight and determination. He couldn't see what impact his words had had on her, save for the bright gold rope beneath them that was, for the moment, holding Calista's sanity together.

_The book_, she repeated again, this time more insistently. _It's the only safe way we can talk._

_What book?_ Severus wondered, bewildered, _I don't understand._

Calista closed her eyes, and in the water in front of him he saw a brief, shimmering image. A tattered, scribbled-in book held onto since she was scarcely old enough to hold a quill.

_Could you read it?_ She wondered again.

Severus nodded, still holding fast to Calista lest she would drift away in the waters.

_Yes, I read it. But there was nothing in it that prepared me for this…_

Calista smiled at him, a smile that he didn't have the time to decode.

_Write in it. We can talk through it. It's safe, because she can't open it. I didn't even know what I was doing when I put the charm on it, and I didn't even realise that was why she had never found it until recently._

_What charm?_ Severus asked, watching as the sturdy rope frayed, little by little. _How can you know it's safe?_

_Because_, Calista whispered, _No one who wants to hurt me can read any of the words in the book._

The water pressed on them more heavily, and he felt the current tear Calista out of his arms. She grabbed onto the yellow-green rope, held safe for now, but it wouldn't be too much longer before it, too, began to fray apart.

With difficulty, Severus took one last look at the dream-image that represented his daughter, and he rose from the water, returning to his own mind. He was in hid office once more, looking at another's face on his daughter's features, and he didn't have much time.

Severus ran from the office, locking Calista inside, while he went to find her book.


	16. Chapter Fourteen

_**Always In Your Shadow**_

**Chapter Fourteen**

Calista's journal was an incredible little book, and Severus marveled that he had not seen it for what it was from the beginning. For most of her life, Calista had been pouring her heart into the tattered little book. What she had not realised was that her budding magical potential was being poured into the book at the same time. Now that Severus studied the book – held it in his hands, and really studied it, analyzing the magical energy that radiated softly within its pages – he saw it.

It was no wonder that Calista had never shown any unusual outbursts of magic as a small child. She hadn't needed to, for her magical potential had found its own outlet. Each time Calista had written in her journal, she had unwittingly channeled her magical power into it in the very ink she had written in.

It was an extraordinary thing, really. He had seen enchanted books before, of course, but this was different. The book was possessed of its own strange magic that was a blend of a mangled, convoluted protection charm and a deeper magic – soul magic.

Soul magic. Muggles sometimes referred to it as love. It was quite possibly the strongest known form of magic. Soul magic could not be willfully performed; it needed to live up to its name, and come from deep within, and more often than not required a most dire sacrifice.

A bitter taste rose up in Severus' mouth suddenly as he considered the book. The very magic that was in this journal, that would help him save his daughter's life, was what had taken away the only other person Severus could truly say he had loved. It had been soul magic that had taken Lily Potter's life in exchange for her son's. Severus pushed all thoughts fiercely from his mind, and opened the cover of the little journal.

He opened to a blank page, one of few in the book. Snatching up a quill from his desk, he scribbled in the book, before passing it across to Calista, watching her carefully.

_What now?_

He watched Calista's eyes scan the page, saw an intense concentration in her features. Even accounting for the book's magical properties, he knew it was an effort for Calista to read it when Bellatrix, forbidden from understanding the words within, was trying so hard to keep her away from it. He was suddenly glad he had kept his message as simple as possible.

Without taking her eyes off the page, Calista extended her hand, palm up. Her fingers curled slightly as Severus placed the quill in her hand. She held her pose a moment, before slowly bringing the quill down to the paper and writing, letter by painstaking letter.

When she passed the book back, Severus saw only two words, pressed so hard into the paper that they bled through to the next page.

_Help me._

The message was simple, but Severus understood it. Not only did Calista need him, she needed _herself_. She was the only one who could rid herself of Bellatrix's possession, and as much as he wanted to fix everything for her, Severus could only serve as an accessory, while Calista fought the battle herself.

So he would do as Calista was asking. He would help her, in every way that he could, and hope that it was enough.

He looked across the desk at Calista. Her dark eyes were flat, blank. Her mouth was pressed into a thin line. He had never seen so much determination on such a small, young face, and it made him realise once again how deeply he loved her. He didn't think he could bear it to lose his daughter to Bellatrix's game now, not when he had come so far in knowing her, in healing her.

**o-o-o-o-o**

Severus knew he was running out of time to find a way to help Calista. He no longer had any notion of when he was speaking to Calista alone, or when it was Bellatrix that was hearing him, so he kept himself guarded. Frustration threatened to overtake him as he realised that he wasn't accomplishing anything.

For hours each day, he and Calista would pass the journal back and forth, but he didn't know if he was actually helping her at all. He filled the pages with instructions and tips on harnessing her talent for occlumency and legilimancy but he had no way of knowing if he was helping, if Calista was even understanding what he wrote.

For Severus, it was like teaching. He poured his energy into the lessons he wrote in the book, because he knew of no other way to help his daughter.

**o-o-o-o-o**

Calista floated in the dark water, waiting. She was cold, and tired. She was nervous, too, because she knew that her mother was coming. Bellatrix was rising slowly from the depths of Calista's mind, from a place she hadn't even been aware of inside herself until her mother had seized it, and begun to corrupt her from inside out.

Calista felt the implicit urgency in her situation; Bellatrix's hold had seeped slowly throughout Calista's consciousness, and she was running out of time to reverse the damage. Now, Bellatrix was launching her final attack. Calista hoped she was ready. If she was able to do this, she would owe her father much for all that he had written in the little journal, for it was those teachings that would stand as her only weapon.

Calista felt a heaviness pressing on her, a foreign invasion fiercely attacking her thoughts, her feelings, _herself_. She was filled with an old, familiar terror. She wanted to be brave, knew she had to be, but she was terrified of Bellatrix, because she had already witnessed the horrific, conscienceless acts her mother was capable of, indeed, reveled in.

An eerie, sinister laughter flooded Calista's hearing.

_Come out and play, daughter._

Calista's heart thudded in her chest, and for a moment terror washed through her so badly that she forgot what she was supposed to be doing, forgot everything but the fear her mother's presence in her mind evoked.

A dark chuckle shook Calista mentally, and she took a second to steady herself. She concentrated, began building.

_It is time for you to serve Him as you were born to do._

She had a foundation. The bravery and determination that was the reason she fought her mother would ground her defenses for this battle. She began building her wall of protection from the substance of her own will.

_Give me your body. I claim it for myself, since my body is trapped in walls of stone._

It was a sturdy foundation, but there were cracks. She was, after all, a child. How could she be expected to defeat Bellatrix? How could she do this by herself? The cracks began to spread, weakening the base of her mental defense.

_Give it to me now. You'll only hurt yourself if you resist._

No! Calista doubled her concentration, remembered an important lesson her father had taught her. He had told her to feed falsehoods into her defense. Her enemy would need to fight her willpower and a confusing mixture of truth and lies, he had explained. Calista found a crack in her wall of determination; a crack made by a seed of fear and uncertainty. She gathered a thought to feed the wall:

_The weak spot is just over there._

Not entirely certain that what she was attempting would even work, Calista envisioned another piece of her mental wall, a piece that was strong and sturdy, and tried to enclose the image of this sturdy place with the message in the weak spot, so Bellatrix would be distracted from pushing at the chinks in the wall.

In other places where she could feel her defenses fraying, she filled the spaces as quickly as she could, with everything that came to mind – inconsequential things, like memories and images concerning her cat, the infamous gray Yellow.

When Calista felt her mother pressing in at her from all sides, despite her best efforts at protecting herself, she threw the last defense she had at her mother: the strength of her own feelings.

Calista bombarded Bellatrix with all the anger and pain she had felt at the latter's hands, flooding her entire mind with the seething, white-hot emotions that she had kept to herself for so long; Her father had begun to glimpse them, but there were depths to the anger, the hurt, the disgust, and even the longing for her mother, that surprised even Calista herself.

When Calista was weak and drained from the experience, she felt – nothing. Where Bellatrix's mind had been warring with her own, she felt, for the briefest moment, plain emptiness, as her own furious emotions slowly dissipated.

And then…

Calista cried out in pain, no longer certain if this entire battle was playing out solely in her mind, or if Bellatrix had managed, somehow, to cross the distance and the brick-and-mortar between them.

If Calista had thrown everything she had at Bellatrix, Bellatrix was surely now returning the favor. Calista felt her body and mind alike assaulted from all sides with Bellatrix's rage. It was accompanied by a familiar, cruel laugh. The laughter, as well as the force of the rage, were of the sorts that are entertained almost exclusively alongside madness, leaving no room for reason or logic.

_Is that really the best you can do? And I had such high hopes for you, once._

Bellatrix's taunting voice echoed throughout Calista's consciousness, and the child felt as though liquid pain had replaced the blood in her veins; the cuts on her back throbbed, an insipid and murderous heartbeat.

_You belong to me, Daughter._

Calista could feel the seaweed-like fronds of her thoughts fraying and disintegrating from the force of the destructive gale that was her mother.

_You always have, and you always will._

Calista felt a flash of defiance, so hot that even Bellatrix's rage seemed cooled by comparison.

_You tried to run from my influence, and yet, look where we are now._

There was a familiar smugness in the words that only doubled the girl's inherent defiance; she felt as if she were kicking at Bellatrix, shoving her away, with the force of her willpower.

Only, it wasn't working. She could still fell the oppression of her mother's presence in her mind. She had a sudden image flash across her eyes, blinding her to everything but the vision itself. Within it, Calista had her back to a huge concrete wall; she crouched low to the asphalt, and saw the scene from above. Her mother had her cornered, her wand extended, and Calista was reminded of her old feelings of insignificance when she had been unable to counter her mother's magic.

Another image flashed across her eyes; a small, sharp knife. A snake, protruding from a skull, the mouths of both symbols dripping blood.

And then, mercifully, the world went black. She could feel nothing, nothing at all.

**o-o-o-o-o**

Severus was aware of the very moment that the fierce battle between Calista's will and her mother's disembodied consciousness broke out.

It was the dead of night, and he was dreaming, of all things, about Calista's cat. The cat had been wandering from room to room in the flat he shared with his daughter (and her wretched cat), carrying something in its mouth.

He didn't know what the cat had been carrying, nor why he had wanted it, but he was aware nonetheless that he should be following it. It sashayed and slunk its way through all the corners and crevices of their rooms. He had been about to corner it underneath the kitchen table when he was suddenly jolted from his sleep.

The second he awoke, he knew what had woken him. His own mind was screaming, a familiar but long-lost feeling tugging at him. After all these months of stony, impassable silence from his daughter's mind, he felt her once again, loud and clear. This had the quality of those unconscious cries he had picked up often during the worst of her nightmares, and so he hastened to her bedroom door, pausing just outside of it to listen.

A bloodcurdling scream, the kind of scream a parent never wants to hear come from his child's mouth, rent the air with a force paralleled only by the force with which Severus threw open to the door of the room.

"Bitch!" he yelled, and the word was not for his daughter, even though it was her side that he rushed to.

Calista stood next to the bed, gripping the bedpost for support. At first, it appeared as though she were sleepwalking, but as he reached her side he realised she was awake. Her eyes were wide open, though her skin was washed-out and her entire body taut and strained.

"Calista," he intoned, placing his arm around her frail body in an effort to help support her. She seemed hardly able to stand, so great was the strain that her internal battle with her mother was putting on every aspect of her being.

The child didn't seem to hear him at all; she continued to grip the bedpost as if it were a life-preserver, and her eyes stared blankly ahead of her. When a convulsion racked Calista's body, he slipped his arm from around her, and instead cupped her face in his hands, forcing eye contact as he had done years ago when he had needed to see the source of her nightmares.

A terrible sense of déjà vu assailed his senses as he stared into the blank, dark depths of her eyes.

He was met immediately with the eerie blank wall that had been in place over the surface of her mind since Bellatrix had first infiltrated the girl's mind. This, he made to brush aside, and was astounded when he couldn't immediately do so.

He took a mental step back, trying to quiet the feeling of ringing alarm that still invaded his own thoughts. He had to look at this from an objective perspective, to see the weakness in the barrier. If only he could quiet, just for a moment, the terrible need that Calista was knowingly or unknowingly crying out with…

He inhaled sharply. Never before had he encountered this cold, blank wall _simultaneously_ with Calista's mental cry for help. That meant that somewhere in this barrier, there had to be some chink that Calista herself had managed to exploit, in order to call out to him.

Armed with his knowledge, he studied the barrier again, and it didn't take him long at all to find a place where he could push through Bellatrix's barrier. It was a crude as well as a cunning thing she had done. The barrier was built with Bellatrix's signature, Bellatrix's intent; but it was fueled with Calista's own reservoir of talent and ability for occlumency.

Just as he had expected, it was his superior skill as a legilimens that allowed him to penetrate Bellatrix's constructed defenses. He knew that Calista's ability had been used against her will, and that had ensured that the barrier could never be impenetrable.

_This is not what you want._

He formed the thought, and enclosed it in a sort of bubble, lodging it between the mental bricks of the barrier, and as soon as he had done so, the barrier began to crumble from bottom up, all of Calista's ability and Bellatrix's intention falling, like sand in a landslide, at his feet.

The barrier was gone. There was nothing now between his own mind, and the fierce battle that was taking place for Calista's.

And that was when he saw what Bellatrix was doing. Calista had been reduced to little more than a ghost inside her own mind, and all of her thoughts and feelings were slowly being corrupted, until the entirety of her mind was stained with her mother's twisted personality.

With the barrier removed, he could also see the images Bellatrix was feeding Calista; they were the stuff of nightmares, and worse than that, the stuff from Calista's own personal nightmares.

Severus reacted. Within seconds, the depth of Calista's mostly untrained occlumency ability was wrapped around what remained of her mind like a cocoon; He used his own knowledge and expertise to shape the little bubble of isolation, and close her off from everything that was taking place inside her mind. She would be oblivious for the time being, and she would be protected, for now.

Now he was left to face Bellatrix, and all the damage she had wrought.

* * *


	17. Chapter Fifteen

**Chapter Fifteen**

"_Sevvie! How I've missed you. I must admit though, this is the last place I'd expected to run into you."_

Her rather sickening voice rang all around him, and he questioned what had ever made him sleep with her in the first place, eleven years ago.

Even in the face of these formidable circumstances, he had the presence of mind to muse that he must have been either desperate or completely unperceptive in regard to the level of disturbia that existed beneath the thin skin of humanity she wore.

Had he ever been as vile as he now saw her to be? It irked him that this was a question he didn't feel equipped to answer, even to himself, with utmost honesty.

Severus cringed inwardly at the use of the nickname, but still managed to keep his reply bland. _I could say the same to you._

Bellatrix cackled, and he could feel her essence all around this place that was supposed to belong to Calista.

Predictably, he felt a cold, scratching feeling at the edges of his own mind, and he was struck by the familiarity of it. Now reaching for his secrets was the same vicious presence he had felt months ago, when he had first begun to be aware of what Bellatrix was doing to Calista.

_Still, it's awfully kind of you to pay me a visit. The brat's not very good company anymore._

Bellatrix had not lost the mastery of the vicious taunting that had so set her apart while he had known her, Severus noted.

_Oh?_ Severus posed softly, merely a whisper of a thought, _Why is that?_

He waited for the echoes of Bellatrix's cackling to subside, biding his time while she answered, playing the back-and-forth game.

_There's not much fight left in her,_ Bellatrix purred, slowly gathering her essence into a ghostlike representation of herself, _I honestly expected I'd breed better than that._

Severus studied this apparition-like form she was creating for herself carefully. It took a moderate amount of skill and strength in legilimancy to create a vision of oneself inside another's mind, and he might be able to gauge the limits of Bellatrix's strength without actually probing.

_Yes,_ Severus responded, setting something in motion with his next words, _I myself never would have imagined the child of the great Bellatrix Black to lack any magical ability whatsoever._

He had spent the months that Calista had been holding Bellatrix off researching and thinking, and he had come up with only one plan that had any hope of freeing his daughter from her mother's influence.

The plan quite possibly hinged on this one sentence, on whether or not Bellatrix believed that _he _at least thought the girl was a Squib.

Bellatrix laughed darkly. _Don't worry for my reputation, Sevvie, dear,_ she said silkily into his mind, _The brat's not a Squib after all. Imagine my delight when I realised that she was only stupid, not inept._

Severus nearly smirked to himself; Bellatrix had believed that he was ignorant of Calista's true abilities, which meant that she would assume the cocoon he had wrapped Calista in was constructed entirely of his own legilimens potential, and thus would believe that he had already drained half of his strength before the battle even began.

_You still haven't told me to what I owe the pleasure of your company, dearie._ Bellatrix intoned in a falsetto.

_No,_ Severus answered, _I haven't._

Bellatrix pulsed around him, the ghost-form she had created already beginning to dissipate. That was a good sign.

_It belongs to me._ Bellatrix finally said, firmly, and Severus wasn't entirely certain if she was referring to Calista's potential for legilimancy, or to Calista herself. It didn't matter. He had no intention of letting the bitch get anything more from his daughter.

_I think you'll find that it's in my possession,_ Severus said silkily, _I don't think I'll be giving it up just yet._

_Is it?_ Bellatrix's reply was a challenge, if anything.

Her apparition-self instantly faded, and he felt instead that she inhabited all of the mindscape before him, spreading her influence as far into Calista's being as she could, as if to prove that she indeed possessed it all.

All the while he and Bellatrix had been engaged in their tense volley, he had been surreptitiously sending out tiny, thread-like pieces of himself. Each strand was so fine that he doubted anyone would ever detect them, let alone Bellatrix, who had never been one for the details.

He had sought out whatever traces of Calista he could find, and he had found something that heartened him. There were perhaps a hundred places he had felt some piece of Calista still anchored to this mindscape, each like a tight little bubble of her essence.

When Severus saw what was contained in each of these little bubbles, he could not suppress a slight smirk.

Nearly every place that Calista had retained some foothold in the domain of her own mind resonated with a single memory of herself and Severus. Each memory was untouched by Bellatrix, which meant that these precious pieces of herself, Calista had managed to keep from her mother.

It also told Severus that her most treasured memories were those that concerned him, and that told him far more than three clichéd words ever could.

He didn't know if Calista had kept these specific memories safe simply because they _were _precious, or because she had had some inkling all along of what Severus intended to do if Calista was not able to defeat Bellatrix on her own.

Either way, it suited his purposes as well as if he himself had hand-selected the things that Bellatrix absolutely must not know about him, and about their daughter.

He did a double-take as one of his seeking strands of thought encountered a bubble that was slightly different form the rest. This one contained a memory, shielded just as effectively as the rest, of a younger Calista sitting up in bed while someone read a book to her. It looked like a children's picture book, but that wasn't what caused Severus to sneer; it was the person who was reading to her, from the armchair next to the bed, that did that.

It was Remus Lupin.

Just as Severus disentangled himself from this particular memory, he became aware of Bellatrix pushing herself against his outermost barrier, determined to penetrate his mind, eager to find out why he was here, in Calista's mind.

Severus studied her approach, and slowly allowed her to enter through a small breach in his outermost barrier. He made every effort to make it seem as though he was fighting against her entry, even as he let her in.

There was nothing of consequence in this layer of his mind, for here he had gathered a compendium of useless, monotonous text from books and day-to-day thoughts that revealed little to nothing about him, or his intentions.

As he let Bellatrix navigate this first layer of his mind, he continued to probe the mindscape they now warred over, seeking out all the places where Bellatrix had established her own strongholds.

He found several places where she had anchored herself to Calista's consciousness, eventually pushing the girl out entirely in some places. Elsewhere, he found fractions of Bellatrix's essence simply floating about the landscape like the spoils of war, and these he guided back to the center of Bellatrix's presence as gently as he could, hoping he could succeed in keeping his actions secret from her.

When he felt Bellatrix's interest in the first layer of his mind waning, felt her grow restless, he allowed her to glimpse the second barrier, and waited while she assaulted it. He allowed her to become frustrated, and used the cover of that distraction to return to the places he had found her strongholds.

At each of these junctures, he attempted to strip the places of Bellatrix's influence, tearing parts of Bellatrix's essence away from the shadowy fronds of Calista's mindscape.

To ensure that Bellatrix remained focused on her intrusion into _his_ mind, rather than his meddling in Calista's, he allowed his second mental barrier to weaken just slightly each time he separated a piece of Bellatrix from what was rightfully his daughter's.

Severus felt Bellatrix's glee as she entered the second layer of his mind. Here, he had placed some of his darkest memories – the things he had done while he was a Death Eater.

He knew Bellatrix well enough to know that she would be sufficiently distracted and enthralled by viewing his memories of the Muggles he had witnessed tortured and killed, the assortment of terrible things he had seen and done. He linked these images with a righteous justification, and a vague sense of duty to the Dark Lord; He suspected Bellatrix knew him well enough not to believe that he had taken joy in the acts themselves, but he could convey a feeling of the means justifying the ends; she need not know that this feeling had evaporated when the Dark Lord had taken Lily utterly and permanently.

By the time Bellatrix had grown tired of these amusements, he was fairly certain he had managed to gather the pieces of Bellatrix that had littered Calista's mind into one place; so now, all that remained was the part of her that was now infiltrating his mind, and one part of her essence still holding fort in what she hoped to ultimately claim for herself.

Severus began to let her see weak spots in the third barrier. These were not enough for her to hope to penetrate, but he orchestrated it so that she would see mere glimpses of what he was hiding behind it, and it concerned what she most wanted to know about: His motives regarding Calista.

He allowed her to see a few carefully constructed images. Himself, cupping Calista's face and staring into her eyes, obviously performing Legilimancy. Calista's face, wearing as hard and miserable an expression as he could ever remember seeing upon it. And, finally, one that was entirely fabricated: an image of himself slapping the girl across the cheek, as he had often seen Bellatrix do in Calista's memories.

Bellatrix cackled even as she strained at the barrier, trying to get beyond it. Still, no matter how hard she pushed, he stood his ground, until he heard her scream of frustration echo throughout the second layer of his mind, and felt her pull all the rest of her strength in, from where he had gathered it into one spot in Calista's mindscape.

At last, when he felt her using every ounce of herself that she had ever brought into Calista's mind, he allowed the barrier to weaken sufficiently for her to get through. He was carefully to make it seem as though he had been defeated by her efforts, and he prepared the bait for the trap he had so carefully laid.

He felt her maneuver through a series of fabricated thoughts and feelings; this was the skill that had ultimately kept him one step ahead of the Dark Lord for so long, for his occlumency skill was so great that he could create false memories that seemed utterly genuine. He used this considerable skill to create the impression that he saw Calista as nothing more than a tool.

At last, Bellatrix drew near to the deepest end of this layer of his mind, just before his fourth barrier. This fourth barrier guarded the _truth_ about his intentions for Calista, and some secrets that would be even more ruinous if Bellatrix found them out, and so he dedicated a large portion of his remaining strength to keeping this barrier strong.

However, he hoped that the bait he had left was glittering enough that Bellatrix would be sufficiently distracted from this barrier.

Months of research, of racking his brain, of sleepless nights, had culminated in this battle, in the laying of this trap, and he played a truly dangerous game, allowing Bellatrix so close to the core of himself, but he had thought it through hundreds of times. There was no other way. This was his only chance of saving his daughter.

Bellatrix approached the darkest corner of this layer of his mind, and saw what was there.

_I will have all the glory. I alone will discover a ritual that can bring the Dark Lord back, and when I offer this child as a sacrifice, the Dark Mark she already bears will lend strength to the Dark Lord. Only then, when he is risen and restored, will I receive the glory I deserve, the place by his side as his second-in-command. I only need to find the ritual, and then nothing can keep me from realising this potential._

Bellatrix laughed. _Fool_, she taunted him, _It is I that will achieve this glory. You always were a lowly sort, and you always will be. You're a Mudblood, you can never have that sort of glory._

Here she paused, taking in everything that Severus had set out for her to see.

_You fathered her, you know_, Bellatrix said softly, and Severus was jolted.

He had known Calista was his the second he had laid eyes upon her, but he had not expected Bellatrix to reveal it to him, especially not now. Even his brief moment of being caught off-guard served him, though; he felt Bellatrix's defenses lower as she enjoyed this game of taunting him about his supposed lost ambitions.

In this moment where her guard was down, he sprung the trap.

Using every ounce of his power that he had left, he shaped a cocoon around Bellatrix, sealing her inside it. He felt her frustration pound away at him, even as he debated what to do with her now that he had successfully removed her influence from Calista's mind.

His original intention had been to destroy her, to shatter her consciousness so she could never again comprehend anything, let alone orchestrate to harm his daughter, but he had underestimated the amount of his strength he would need to complete the battle.

Between shaping Calista's ability into a cocoon, and creating false memories for Bellatrix, and guarding his fourth mental barrier, and finally springing the trap and sealing Bellatrix inside a cocoon of his own making, there was nothing left with which to destroy her.

There was only one thing he could do, really.

Regretfully, he directed Bellatrix's essence back to the container that was intended for it; In legilimancy, the mind and all its components always yearn to be where they belong, within the safety of its own mindscape, and so it was easy to direct Bellatrix's essence back to her own body, now that he had it trapped in one piece.

He vowed to complete his task some day, and utterly destroy her, but there was something even more critical to deal with at the moment.

Exhausted, Severus rose from the depths of what remained of his daughter's mind.

In the physical world, Calista lay limp in his arms, her eyes closed. She appeared to be in a deep slumber, but Severus knew better.

Although he had directed the shape of the cocoon, it was actually a product of Calista's own occlumency and legilimancy skills, and so it was up to her to break free from it. The problem was that she had been so nearly destroyed by Bellatrix's fierce attack that he didn't know if she had the strength or the will to do it.

He knew there wasn't much time. If the landscape of someone's mind was unoccupied long enough, it would begin to deteriorate in much the same way that an abandoned house would. The mind was designed to carry the conscious and the subconscious in many different tiers and chambers, but when left empty the walls between these chambers would rot.

If this happened, the best-case scenario for someone being restored back into that vessel was that they would never be quite the same; their personality, memories, even knowledge could become muddled, lost, and disfigured forever.

The worst-case scenario was complete and udder madness.

Severus lifted Calista into his arms, and flew through the castle, cutting a path to the Headmaster's quarters.


	18. Chapter Sixteen

**Chapter Sixteen**

As Severus carried his daughter through the corridors of Hogwarts in the half-light that was comprised of midnight and a few guttering candelabra, he was struck by the realisation that she didn't really fit into his arms anymore.

Her arms and legs spilled out of his grasp, and for the first time, he felt his arms growing tired under her weight. A reel of memories and emotions played in his mind while he traversed the castle, and he had an unreasonable urge to laugh.

This position he found himself in now was one he never would have imagined for himself, not even in his lightest or darkest phases of life, although this, now, was somehow a combination of both of those.

How ironic it was that he, who had never felt equipped to carry even the burden of his own life, was now responsible for someone else's. All the while that he had been raising Calista, he had been so engrossed in each day that he hadn't even bothered to retrospect on the ways that he was changing along with the course of his life.

He realised, all of a sudden, that he and Calista had managed to create a family from the ashes of heartbreak, against all odds. It was never perfect, and both of them were deeply flawed, but they were a part of each other now, for whatever that was worth.

And so it was for both of their sakes that he pounded his fist presently on the Headmaster's door.

**o-o-o-o**

It was to Albus Dumbledore's credit that he looked alert and awake on the other side of the desk, even as he listened raptly to Severus' words in his night robe. In fact, if it _weren't_ for this robe – and slippers – one might never know that he'd just been awakened in the dead of the night to solve a magical crisis.

Albus' blue eyes blazed as Severus related, as quickly and concisely as he could, what had happened to the young girl, particularly when Severus reached the point in the story where he explained _who_ had reached Calista's mind, and from where.

As soon as Albus had seen the child seemingly asleep in his Potions Master's arms, he had used his deductive reasoning to determine that she wasn't really sleeping, that something was wrong – otherwise, of course, he wouldn't have been seeing the pair of them at three in the morning. He had instructed Severus to bring her to the Hospital Wing while they spoke. Severus had been hesitant to leave her alone, but had acquiesced.

Albus let Severus tell the tale in its entirety without interruption, but as soon as the younger man had stopped talking, he fired several questions.

"Is this the first time you know of that Bellatrix has attempted to contact her child from Azkaban?"

Severus scowled briefly, finding himself irritated at the Headmaster for referring to Calista as Bellatrix's child. She was, of course, in the most literal sense, but it didn't prevent Severus from tailoring his reply to address the phrasing.

"As far as I know, it is the first time that she has been successful in contacting _my_ daughter."

Albus didn't even blink. "But has she tried before?"

Severus' upper lip curled. "I don't know."

Albus steepled his fingers together in front of him, leaning his elbows on the desk. "And Bellatrix was the only nonnative presence that you discovered in Calista's mind?"

Severus nodded curtly.

"What do you think allowed her access?" Albus asked intently, but quietly, almost as if he were talking to himself, "Some sort of spell she had placed on the child long ago? Or did she forge a connection somehow through the disfigurement of that Dark Mark you told me about? Or…"

Severus tightened his jaw. "Or what?"

"I was only reflecting," Albus said carefully, "That there is a possibility that the contact was initiated by Calista rather than Bellatrix."

"No."

"Please understand me, Severus," Albus said softly, making clear eye contact with the younger man, "I am concerned foremost with the fact that a Death Eater has managed to infiltrate Hogwarts Castle from _within Azkaban Prison_. It is my responsibility as Headmaster of this school to find out how this happened and prevent it from ever happening again. In order to do this, I _must_ consider every single possibility. You understand this, yes?"

"I understand it perfectly well," Severus said softly, "But I insist you understand that it is _not_ within the realm of possibility that Calista invited Bellatrix into her mind."

"Perhaps not consciously," Albus said, "But the bond between mother and child is very strong. I caution you never to forget that."

Severus felt stung; the bond between mother and child was one of the many factors that had conspired to take Lily away from him so many years ago. He wondered if the cunning old man was using the opportunity to remind him of his promises and obligations once more, or if this connection was made only in his own dark mind.

"I'm convinced it has something to do with that pattern – the Dark Mark," Severus said, pushing on, "Bellatrix was fixating on it. She kept replaying the memory of when… of when she created it to Calista, and she seized on the false ambition I created that hinged on using the Mark."

Both men knew that Severus had tried in vain to erase the scars from Calista's back; he had brought her to Hogwarts' mediwitch, and then to St. Mungo's, and he had tried several spells and potions for healing; nothing had worked.

"If this is the case, then it is absolutely imperative that we find a way to counter this vulnerability in Calista's mind," Albus warned, "For her sake as well as for the safety of the school."

"I know. I've been trying, from the beginning, to help her develop her Occlumency skill, but she is a child. It will take years before she can even hope to have the skills necessary to keep a witch trained by the Dark Lord himself out of her mind. If anything has hammered this point home to me, it's been this entire ordeal."

Albus allowed a moment, either to gather or his thoughts or in respect of Severus' anguish. When he spoke again, his voice was gentle.

"I think I have a way to protect Calista, temporarily, from further attack. But there is something you and she both need to understand. What I can do is only temporary. In the end, Calista may have to battle with Bellatrix again. There is nothing you or I, or anyone but Calista can do to keep Bellatrix out of her mind permanently."

"Oh, I doubt there is truly _nothing_," Severus said darkly, thinking of murder.

"Think very carefully of what you are considering," Albus warned urgently, not bothering to indulge in any false pretenses regarding the intent of Severus' comment, "Murder is a permanent stain on the soul, and you can never replace what you lose when you commit it. You should have learned this by now, Severus."

Albus regarded Severus rather kindly, despite his words.

"You are also in a unique position with your daughter, as far as I understand," Albus continued, "She trusts you, even though her trust is so difficult to earn. Perhaps more importantly, she feels safe with you. I have never been inside Calista's mind, so I cannot pretend to know how she would feel if she were to witness you performing an act so dark, but I warn you that it is a path you can never turn away from, once you have begun down it."

Severus felt the words sink in, and he knew that the Headmaster was right. He had carefully kept the darkest parts of himself from Calista, and would give nearly anything to keep her from ever learning about them. He didn't know how she would react if he murdered Bellatrix, even if it was with the intention of protecting her.

He wanted his daughter to believe that it was possible to exist without causing harm to others. He wanted her to understand that not every person was the way her mother was. The last thing he wanted to do was reinforce the twisted worldview of Bellatrix.

Still, it was a problem to deal with another day, and hopefully not a day that would come soon. In the meantime, he had to restore Calista to her mind; and he had to do it quickly.

"What is your idea?" Severus finally asked.

"I will need you to perform legilimancy on Calista once more, I'm afraid. Erasing selected memories is terribly advanced and I fear it would put too much strain on her already weakened mind. Instead, we need to find the specific memories that allowed Bellatrix to enter Calista's mind, and isolate those memories. They need to be stored somewhere safe, where they cannot be exploited."

"You're speaking of extracting the memories from Calista's mind and storing them somewhere else?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes. The ghosts of these memories will still be embedded in Calista's mind; there isn't anything we can do about that that wouldn't put the rest of her memories at risk. The mind is such a complicated, interconnected thing… Essentially, the memories would still be somewhere in Calista's mind, but she would be unable to access them, and so would anyone else."

Severus narrowed his eyes at the Headmaster. "Why not just keep the memories isolated forever? Why is it only a temporary solution?"

Albus sighed. "Because eventually, Bellatrix will find another way in. As I said, I believe that Calista will one day need every piece of herself to confront Bellatrix again."

Severus considered his options. Admittedly, there weren't many of them.

He nodded tightly to the Headmaster.

"Let us not tarry then," Albus said, rising from his chair and plucking several glass vials from a delicate holder inside a cupboard behind his desk, "As soon as you have isolated the memories that allow Bellatrix access, we can begin to coax Calista's mind back into itself."

**o-o-o-o**

Calista's mindscape without Calista inhabiting it was, in a word, desolate. It was like a huge, empty house. Vague memories of the battle between herself and Bellatrix still lingered like the acrid smell of smoke after a devastating fire. Scattered throughout, the tight, protected bubbles of memory that Calista had kept safe were still intact, but everything else was bleak and empty.

Still exhausted from his own struggle with Bellatrix, Severus approached the cocoon he had wrapped Calista in only hours before. Carefully, he unraveled those threads which were actually his own, leaving her occlumency and legilimancy skill to take whatever shape it chose.

He felt a pang of fearful disappointment when the cocoon retained its shape without his guidance. It was an indication that Calista was either unwilling or unable to return to fill the crevices of her mind.

Daunted, he slipped gently through a tiny opening in the cocoon that unraveling his own threads had made.

Inside, there was pandemonium. He was assaulted with thousands and thousands of memories, thoughts, and emotions crammed into a space that was too small to contain them. Prevalent among them was fear.

It was a painful process for Severus to seek out the darkest of Calista's memories, but he understood the importance of doing so. It was only by reminding himself that he was, temporarily at least, freeing Calista from having to deal with these memories that he was able to view them all again, and to gather them into himself.

At last, he felt that he had done as thorough of a cleansing of the darkest of her memories as he could. He was tempted to take away all of her painful memories, but he knew that the more he took, the more Calista would eventually have to come to terms with later on, if Dumbledore's warnings held true.

She would still remember the majority of what Bellatrix had done to her. She would still remember all the hateful teasing she had endured at the orphanage, and she would still remember most of her battle with Bellatrix.

She would not remember getting the scars on her back, nor any memories that referred to the origination of those scars. Severus had no idea what he would offer as an explanation when she undoubtedly noticed them and asked about it, but that was a problem for another day.

After a long moment's hesitation, Severus also gathered as many of the memories as he could that referred to Bellatrix's desire to use Calista as an instrument of the Dark Lord.

When he was finished, he gathered a piece of his own essence, filling a bubble with things he could not name; he enclosed an image of himself holding Calista as she fell asleep in his arms for the first time, over four years ago, the two of them stirring a cauldron together, him correcting papers into the night while she kept him company, drawing unidentifiable pictures while she sprawled on his office floor.

Included as well were feelings he had no words for: the leap of joy he experienced whenever he saw a smile steal across her face, the contentment he felt while he tutored her in potion-making, the simple conviction he held that she was the most precious thing he had left.

In the end, he had added one final thing to the mix: A scene that had played out nearly every morning since the day after Calista's seventh birthday; he entered the kitchen, nearly tripped over Calista's cat and fought an extremely difficult battle with himself not to simply let the thing loose outside and be done with it. Instead, with difficulty, he leaned down and patted the creature gingerly on the head, accepting that for whatever unfathomable reason, it held a place in his daughter's heart.

Finally, his work finished, Severus gently rose from Calista's mind yet again.

**o-o-o-o**

Beside the bed in the Hospital Wing where Calista still carried on the appearance of slumber, Severus lifted his wand to his temple, carefully extracting one of the memories he had taken from Calista.

Albus held one of several glass vials out, and Severus placed the memory in the vial, where it glowed innocuously. It looked deceptively beautiful, silvered in the narrow glass tube, and yet what it represented was almost unfathomably ugly.

One by one, Severus transferred each of Calista's darkest memories into the vials, and Albus capped each one with a little silver stopper.

When at last they were done, Severus looked expectantly at the Headmaster.

"Now what?"

Albus rose, his blue eyes passing over the child before meeting Severus' gaze.

"Now, we wait. And we hope that Calista has the will to reclaim her own mind."


	19. Conclusion

**Chapter Seventeen**

When Calista regained her senses, there was a blissful moment before she recalled the horrific battle with Bellatrix.

When it came crashing down upon her, she prepared herself for a struggle, readying her defences.

And then she realized, there was nothing to defend against. She felt as though she were in a small bubble of… well, nothing.

Suspecting an underhanded manoeuvre of her mother's, Calista tried to reach cautiously outward with her mind, and found that she couldn't.

Her primary thought was that her mother had managed, somehow, to disable her ability to hide, even in her own mind. It was several moments before she realised that she was already hiding, and that was why she couldn't feel Bellatrix's presence any longer.

She also realised it was quite comfortable inside her hiding place. She entertained the possibility, quite seriously, of staying there forever.

Protected or not from her mother or from anyone else, though, Calista found that she was not protected from her own memories. They were here with her, in this hiding place, the good and the bad alike.

Still, memories were just that, as her father had taught her. Some of her own were horrific, but at least she knew what they were, knew what to expect.

As soon as she had thought of her father though, she knew that she couldn't simply stay here, hiding, forever. Because the last thing she remembered seeing before she found herself in this hiding place was feeling her father, entering the fight against Bellatrix.

Calista wanted desperately to remain hidden, but she was worried on behalf of her father. He had never fought Bellatrix before, to her knowledge; he had no firsthand knowledge, she reasoned, of the terrible damage she could cause.

Now that she was aware of things (and she rather wished she could have remained blissfully unaware, as she had been only moments ago), she knew she couldn't sit idly while her father was left at Bellatrix's mercy.

Calista attempted to reach out again, feeling for some indication of what was going on elsewhere in her mindscape.

She couldn't feel anything beyond the barrier that kept her safe.

Frustrated, she tried again, and this time she felt, when she searched, a _tug_ on the barrier itself, and she realised with a start that the barrier was of her own making. When she reached once more for her slight legilimancy skill, she felt the barrier unravelling a bit more.

She hesitated, uncertain if she was truly ready to peek beyond the barrier.

And then she felt something that was not quite her own, here in this bubble that was her protection.

She reached for the _something_, whatever it was, and knew it belonged to her father. She unravelled another little thread from the barrier in order to examine it.

She was suddenly overcome by all the things he had sealed in this little packet; she felt in a way he never quite said that she was dear to him. When she felt his internal struggle not to let Yellow loose, she couldn't help herself; she laughed.

Perhaps it was this laughter, or simply the encouragement Severus had left for her, but Calista tore a little more of the barrier down, and used the strength she regained from doing so to send a tentacle of thought out beyond the barrier.

It felt empty. There was no sign of the furious, raging battle she had been engaged in. More importantly, there was no sign of Bellatrix. There was only an emptiness, rather like a house whose occupants have gone on vacation; a pregnant sort of _waiting_.

Slowly, she touched each of the bubbles she had managed to preserve from Bellatrix's influence. As she re-accustomed herself to her dearest memories, she felt a little braver.

Bit by bit, Calista let her barrier dissolve. Sometimes she became frightened of the emptiness that still lingered in the far corners of her mind, and she paused; but once she had begun the process of returning her mindscape to order, she felt a strong tugging sensation urging her to continue, to put things back as they ought to be.

Finally, Calista tore the foundation of the barrier down, and settled back into the deepest corners of herself.

When she was finished, she was unnerved to find there were still a few places that felt empty. There was a foreboding darkness to each of these places, and Calista did her best to ignore these. Still, they unsettled her, and she noticed them constantly, the way one notices a blank spot on a wall which has always held a painting.

After slowly becoming accustomed, Calista realized dimly that she was asleep, and that it was time to wake up.

**o-o-o-o**

It was almost four days by the time Calista opened her eyes again. During the first two days, Severus had been absolutely frantic and had refused to leave her beside; by the third day, Dumbledore had quite firmly sent him away, perhaps for fear that the floorboards in the hospital wing would wear out for his pacing.

Severus couldn't concentrate on anything in his office, and he finally decided to leave the castle. Dumbledore had promised to send word the moment Calista awakened, which the older man seemed to have faith she would do.

Severus was not entirely certain she would; given what she had gone through, and now given the opportunity to hide, would she truly wish to return?

Still, he was doing her no good by pacing near her bedside, so he had done something he rather needed to anyway.

He went to Spinner's End. He had been there only a handful of times since Calista had come to live with him, and he had never brought Calista here. It seemed a place ill-suited to raising a child in any case, and his own terrible memories of the place solidified his conviction not to bring her to it.

It was as rickety and depressing as always; the flat was only dimly lit from outside, and there was no plumbing to speak of – the place had never been modernised, and the loo was still out back.

As he stood in the middle of the sitting room (rather more of a library, in his case), he considered, not for the first time, trying to sell the place. It wouldn't turn much of a profit, to be certain, but it would at least be off his hands, and then perhaps he could purchase a flat somewhere else.

Thus far, Severus had obtained permission during class recesses to remain at Hogwarts with Calista. Other professors had done the same occasionally, but none stayed as often as Severus did.

However, Albus had already relayed to Severus that he didn't favour Calista living at Hogwarts during summer recesses once she was a student. Severus, who realized on some level at least that living in a dungeon might not be the ideal situation for a growing girl, had agreed.

Albus had told him as well that once Calista began at Hogwarts, she would live in her House dormitory rather than in Severus' quarters. This, he had not given much thought to; it was difficult to even envision his flat without her.

Severus exhaled heavily as he half-heartedly set to cleaning and airing the flat. Each moment he spent here was in utter misery, for there were too many dark memories attached to the place; and yet, it was the only place in the whole world which was exclusively his, and so he was reluctant to part with it.

**o-o-o-o**

After a day and a half, Severus had endured as much of Spinner's End as he cared to, and returned to the castle. He had no sooner walked in the front gate than an owl had swooped down in front of him, brandishing a parchment on its leg.

Severus read the brief note from Dumbledore and fairly flew into the foyer of the castle and up to the hospital wing.

True to the note Dumbledore had sent, Calista was awake when Severus arrived. This, he had been expecting but was pleased nonetheless. What was unexpected was the way that Calista leapt from her bed when he entered, and rushed to embrace him. It was, Severus privately thought, nearly as pleasing as it was surprising.

Severus put his arms about his daughter, looking down at her ever-tangled head of black hair. Admittedly, his embrace was still a little stiff; no matter how often he made the effort to show his daughter affection, it was a quality which simply did not come to him naturally.

When she lifted her face to look up at him, her eyes were damp with tears, but she offered him a weak, watery smile nonetheless.

"Th.. thank you for not letting Yellow escape," she said, a bit breathily, and Severus was so caught by surprise that he actually laughed.

"It won't be an issue for much longer," he managed, "That wretched cat will live in your dormitory when the school year starts, I reckon."

**o-o-o-o**

The summer recess was almost halfway over by the time Severus had moved out of the castle with Calista. Ordinarily, for such a brief length of time he would simply have remained at the castle, but Calista was due to begin at Hogwarts when term started, and he wanted her to have some semblance, at least, of beginning school in the normal fashion.

A professor's salary was far from lucrative, but he had found a place at last. The owners were an elderly couple who summered in the Virgin Islands. It was arranged that Severus would lease the flat for himself and his daughter during the summers, and he had the option of eventually purchasing the flat from the couple in five years' time, which was when they planned on selling the home to live with their son and his wife.

For now, it was easily afforded, because he only needed to lease it during the summer months. The flat was on the first level of a semi-detached home which shared a small garden with the tenants of the ground level. In short, it was exactly the sort of place Severus supposed a child should grow up.

Though Calista grumbled about having to move all her things to a new home, only to move them back in several weeks when term began, Severus suspected she was actually glad for the change of scenery. Their new place was airier, by virtue of it actually having windows, and he noticed a definite upswing in Calista's energy over the course of that summer.

There were changes in Calista since the battle with Bellatrix. Although she was still moody, unpredictable, and downright peevish at times, he found she was not as prone to deliberately provoke him into an argument without any real grounds.

He did not know whether she had simply come to terms, at last, with the fact that he would not leave her or abuse her no matter how horrid she was, or if it was a result of relieving her of a few choice memories about Bellatrix.

It was inevitable that Calista would ask about the scars on her back, and Severus had prepared an answer over the day and a half he had been at Spinner's End while she recovered.

In the end, he had known that he could not outright lie to her. Instead, he told her that it had been caused by her mother, and had advised her not to think about it. He had hedged when more directly questioned, and had only told her that he didn't know the details surrounding the damage, implying that if she didn't remember, it was best left alone.

Of course, Calista would not be satisfied with such an answer, but he would not give her a better one, and so she resigned herself to not recalling the circumstances for the marks precisely. Severus knew that eventually he would need to let on to her, but for now he wished only that she enjoy the summer in a manner wholly appropriate for a girl her age.

Calista spent a disproportionate amount of time within the walls of their flat reading her schoolbooks, determined to be prepared for the start of term. However, she also went for walks to the high street with her father, and she spent time in the garden with her cat.

She never did make friends with any of the other children in the neighbourhood, she finding them all, in her own words, "priggish and daft," and they finding her to be… well, rather unpalatable. She may have opened up a bit more with Severus, but she was still unapproachable overall.

Severus hoped she would soften enough to make friends at Hogwarts once term started, but didn't see the point in forcing her to befriend the Muggle children that lived nearby. After all, he found their families to be just as daft as Calista did, and didn't bother to hide it.

The apple did not fall far from the tree, where Severus and Calista were concerned, and at times this made them poor company even for each other, for both were snappish and, at times, even caustic. However, this also meant that they understood each other, which was a first for both of them – and ultimately, what caused them to be, conventionally or not, truly happy being a family.

THE END

**Author's Note: **This is, indeed, the end of this story. However, if you'd like to read more about Severus and Calista, I will be starting a sequel very shortly, which will depict Calista's time at Hogwarts. You will see, in that story, more familiar characters, particularly as Calista's third year (and Harry Potter's first) approach. Thank you so much to everyone who stuck by this fic (even when, for a time, I didn't). It's officially my FIRST completed fic to top 50,000 words and I'm gearing up for the next one! You'll likely notice that I'm making efforts to make the setting of the story more authentic, so please bear with the inconsistencies between UK and US spellings and phrasings as I gradually parse them over. I'd like to thank **whitehound** for constructive criticism all the way through, and, as importantly, for the wonderful "Britpicker's Guide" I found on her website, which is so far the most helpful thing I've come across in trying to fix authenticity issues in my story.

Stay tuned, as they say, for the further exploits of Severus Snape's unlikely fatherhood!


End file.
